The Ice Cream Monster had only been the spark.
Afghanistan was the powder keg.
Drex Valen had expected sothing like this to happen from the start. The region's political landscape was already stretched tight enough to snap at the slightest pressure. Add the Ten Rings into the mix, and the entire country beca a live grenade with the pin halfway out.
Now it had finally exploded.
After seizing fifteen villages from the Ten Rings during the chaos, U.S. forces decided to press the advantage.
An armored chanized task force rolled deeper into hostile territory while Apache gunships prepared to provide air support overhead.
The helicopters finished refueling at the forward operating station and imdiately lifted off again, moving toward designated holding positions roughly twenty kiloters from the target zone. Once the recon helicopters and Global Hawk drones confird enemy coordinates, the Apaches would move in and begin strike operations imdiately.
anwhile, three M1A2 Abrams main battle tanks locked onto targets two kiloters away.
Their fire-control systems were terrifyingly efficient.
Unlike older targeting systems, the Abrams used independently stabilized optics separated from the gun assembly itself. Once the gunner aligned the reticle using the control grips, onboard computers automatically calculated ballistic corrections using wind speed, shell temperature, distance, angular velocity, elevation, and terrain slope.
A firing solution appeared.
The tanks opened fire almost simultaneously.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The massive recoil shook the armored vehicles violently.
Through the targeting optics, the gunners watched three flashes streak across the battlefield before slamming directly into their targets.
Inside Ten Rings territory, the situation had already beco total chaos.
On one side, they faced the Ice Cream Monster, an unstoppable horror casually destroying massive poppy fields while ignoring conventional gunfire.
On another, Arican chanized forces advanced with overwhelming firepower.
And now Taliban fighters, drugged out of their minds and fearless to the point of insanity, were attacking as well.
Three fronts.
Three disasters.
Without the massive support they'd received from the CIA over the years, the Ten Rings would have already collapsed entirely.
Even so, against U.S. chanized assaults backed by Apache helicopters, their resistance was pitifully weak.
So far, the Aricans had only lost a single Apache gunship.
And even that happened because soone fired one of Stark Industries' older advanced RPG launchers.
The rocket moved far faster than standard RPG systems, fast enough that evasion beca nearly impossible at close range.
Still, one helicopter wasn't enough to stop the offensive.
Then everything changed.
A missile slamd directly into one of the Abrams tanks.
The explosion tore the armored vehicle apart instantly.
And from the Ten Rings side of the battlefield, a gigantic steel machine erged through smoke and fla.
"Son of a bitch! They've got a War Machine unit!"
"No, that's an Iron Monger!"
Several Arican soldiers nearly lost their minds.
How the hell did the Ten Rings get their hands on an Iron Monger?
Had Drex Valen actually sold military exosuits to terrorists?
The Iron Monger charged forward like a steel beast.
Arican troops scattered in panic.
Nobody wanted to stand in front of that thing.
Its armor plating alone looked thicker than a human torso, layered with reinforced alloys that ordinary rifles might as well have been throwing pebbles against.
Inside the suit, the Ten Rings commander roared in fury as he unleashed the rotary cannon mounted on the Iron Monger's right arm.
The weapon was twenty milliters of pure industrial slaughter.
When it opened fire, reinforced concrete fortifications five centiters thick could be shredded apart under sustained firepower.
The battlefield vanished beneath exploding dirt, pulverized stone, and clouds of debris.
There was nowhere for the Arican infantry to hide.
Humans were not built to survive that kind of firepower.
The first soldiers caught in the barrage exploded into chunks of blood and torn flesh.
Bodies ripped apart under the cannon's savage stream of rounds.
A soldier's head detonated instantly.
According to later combat analysis, one hundred and sixty-four rounds passed through the space his skull had occupied in less than a second.
Another soldier looked down in horror after being hit and realized his lower body was simply... gone.
The incoming barrage cut n apart like an invisible guillotine.
Blood.
Organs.
Bone fragnts.
Detached limbs.
The Iron Monger trampled forward through all of it while the Ten Rings commander laughed like a madman.
Then a tank shell hit him square in the chest.
BOOM!
The Iron Monger staggered backward several ters.
Its armor crumpled inward from the impact, forming a deep dent roughly the size of a fist, but the shell failed to penetrate completely.
Inside the Abrams, the tank commander reacted instantly.
"Reload! Switch to depleted uranium sabot rounds!"
The muscular Black loader grabbed an M829A2 armor-piercing round from storage and slamd it into the breech.
"Up!"
The infantry fighting vehicles accompanying the tanks opened fire simultaneously.
Their M242 Bushmaster chain guns roared at maximum rate of fire.
Tracer rounds filled the night sky like streams of molten light.
A storm of steel.
The impacts hamred against the Iron Monger continuously, throwing off its balance and disrupting its aim.
Then the Abrams fired again.
THOOM!
The M829A2 sabot round struck dead center.
The Iron Monger's frontal armor exceeded seven hundred milliters in effective thickness. Most anti-tank warheads would have failed against it completely.
But depleted uranium penetrators were another story entirely.
The shell punched through.
The reactor housing at the suit's center ruptured violently.
Inside the cockpit, the Ten Rings commander scread.
The penetrator liquefied under friction into superheated tal plasma, spraying directly into the interior compartnt. Flesh, muscle, and bone lted almost instantly beneath the incandescent torrent.
The screaming didn't last long.
"Damn," Drex muttered while observing remotely. "That looked painful."
To be fair, it wasn't a flaw in the Iron Monger design itself.
The real problem was the buyer being cheap.
If the Ten Rings commander had paid for the optional secondary Kryptonian alloy coating, things would've gone very differently.
Even a single milliter of the material provided defensive performance comparable to nearly one hundred milliters of conventional steel plating, while also maintaining exceptional structural toughness.
It lacked true Kryptonian self-repair properties, but the defensive boost alone was absurd.
Unfortunately, secondary Kryptonian alloy cost ten thousand dollars per gram.
And coating an Iron Monger fra with that material?
That price tag bordered on national bankruptcy.
...
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