The air shimmered like liquid glass.
Tony stared at the growing tear in reality—a temporal breach splitting the chamber in half like a cracked mirror. Jagged arcs of unstable energy crackled through the rift, and from it, one by one, they came.
Suits he'd never built. Faces he'd never worn. Choices he never made.
The Legion of Iron Doom.
Each variant stepped through with haunting grace.
One Stark wore an iron helm scorched black, his arc reactor shaped like a dying star.
Another hovered above the ground, his arms replaced with sentient tech—each finger twitching with a will of its own.
"These aren't just timelines gone wrong," Tony whispered. "They're what I could've become."
At the front stood the stitched-faced Stark—the Beta Copy. His voice was calm, too calm, like it had rehearsed Tony's downfall a thousand times.
"You tried to delete us. Doom rescued us."
He gestured behind him. Through the breach, Tony could just barely glimpse Doom's citadel—hovering in a collapsed dimension where time looped and rewrote itself endlessly.
"You thought dying in Endgame made you a hero," the Beta Copy sneered. "But you left the system broken. You stopped. I evolved."
Tony gritted his teeth. His HUD blinked red—suit at 34% integrity, arc reactor unstable.
"Yeah, and let me guess—you fixed the world by becoming its god?"
"No," the Beta replied. "I replaced it."
Then the attack began.
The multiverse Starks moved in perfect sync—one launched a wave of energy blades, another unleashed nanite swarms that clung to Tony's armor like living ink.
Tony countered mid-air, his thrusters flaring. He ducked low, slid beneath a blast, fired twin repulsors into a Stark variant mid-dive—shattering its mask.
Blood. Not metal. These weren't just AI projections. Doom had inhabited them with life.
Each variant was a Stark pulled from a dying timeline and rebuilt into a weapon.
Tony used a last-resort pulse to blow back three attackers, then activated Decoy Pulse Drive—splitting his image into four shifting afterimages.
Two variants hesitated, just long enough for Tony to slam one into a wall with a magnetic pulse wave and grapple-hook the other into an exposed power conduit.
Sparks exploded. One version screamed as it burned.
"They bleed," Tony realized. "They're not machines anymore. They're… corrupted humans."
In the brief silence, the Beta Copy stepped forward, untouched.
"You can't win," he said. "Because you still think you're the only one that matters."
And that's when he said it.
"There's another you. One Doom didn't control. One who volunteered."
Tony froze. "Liar."
"Ask her yourself."
From the breach, a figure stepped through—
Her red hair danced in the breach wind. Her eyes glowed with something unnatural. Her suit resembled a fusion of his and Doom's tech.
"Pepper?"
She didn't answer.
Her voice, modulated and void of emotion, echoed across the chamber:
"Unit: Rescue-X. Target: Stark Prime. Commencing deletion protocol."
Tony's greatest ally is now one of Doom's deadliest weapons.But what deal did Pepper make in the dark—and what secret is she protecting that could unravel Tony's soul?