Even if soone managed to get hold of the prototype, all they could ever produce was the shell.
The core, the inner engine, the Arc Reactor itself, was another matter entirely. That part could not be copied so easily.
Obadiah Stane was furious. He scrambled through every connection he had, trying to find out where Tony Stark had gone.
If Drex Valen had turned Tony over to the Ten Rings, there was always a chance the group might eventually send him back. They would not yet know that Tony had already built and sold an Iron Suit. Drex had considered that possibility, which was exactly why the n he used to play the terrorists were beast soldiers under his command.
Every day, they took Tony Stark out at the sa ti, just long enough to let him see the ordinary civilians being crushed under the boots of n ard with Stark Industries weapons.
Tony's emotions went through their own slow collapse.
At first, it had been anger.
Then panic.
Then anxiety, irritation, and raw frustration.
Now he had moved into guilt, self-reproach, and pain.
Tony had always believed his weapons were helping fight terrorism. Now those sa weapons were being used to hurt innocent people.
That was the difference between him and the usual crop of arms dealers. Tony still had sothing precious and stupid inside him. A shred of innocence. The kind that could survive only until it got burned away.
He had not beco a hero by accident.
The seed was already there. It had just needed the right spark.
Drex had worried, briefly, that accelerating Tony's fall by several years might push him too far from that path. But after watching his reaction, he knew he had been overthinking it.
Tony Stark was always going to beco Iron Man.
"Still," Drex thought with a faint snort, "he can suffer a little longer."
Tony needed more pressure. More pain. More ti in the furnace.
Because if he got off easy, he would never beco what he was supposed to be.
Tony's disappearance dragged Drex Valen into the spotlight as well. He was summoned for questioning, since he was the biggest suspect by far.
Drex answered with simple logic. Blade Technology Industries was just a technology company. It had no ability to carry out terrorism or kidnap a billionaire industrialist.
That was enough for him.
He was also rich enough to do what rich people do best when cornered. He hired a ridiculous number of top-tier lawyers and paid them without blinking. The result was inevitable.
He won.
On the SHIELD side, Nick Fury kept a close watch on Drex's every move. He monitored his signals too, only to discover later that Black Queen had been feeding him false readings. The real trail had been twisted back in the opposite direction, and SHIELD itself was the one getting traced and watched.
Days passed.
Then more days.
Tony Stark still had not been found. No ssage. No ransom demand. Nothing.
By then, most people had already decided he was dead.
The kidnappers had not even bothered to call for money.
Stark Industries' stock began to slide. At the sa ti, the lawsuit between Blade Technology Industries and Stark Industries, which the public had expected to drag on for years, turned into a one-sided blowout. Blade Technology Industries won outright.
Because Stark Industries could not actually produce Iron Suits at scale, the military abandoned them. Blade Technology Industries was awarded $800 million in damages.
Stark Industries seed to back down after that. They did not continue appealing in other courts. If they had kept at it, the different laws in different states might have given them another shot, but they let it go.
In truth, Obadiah had already smashed everything in his office that could be smashed.
Every morning, he woke up and watched Stark Industries' stock sink lower.
The stress nearly gave him a stroke. Or worse. The man was old enough that his heart had no business being treated like a punching bag.
The $800 million itself did not matter much to Stark Industries.
What infuriated Obadiah was the military's attitude.
One change of tone and Stark Industries was left to face the full weight of Blade Technology Industries' rage alone. Uld had been absolutely furious about Stark copying one of their flagship products. His legal team had slamd the issue again and again until the damages were finally pushed up to $800 million. At first, the figure had been only $50 million.
Drex knew better than to expect Stark Industries to be crippled by this. He was not the kind of man who got emotionally attached to every single outco. If he cared about everything, he would never have ti for anything else.
Still, Blade Technology Industries had now quietly revealed plans to set up a branch in China.
That made the United States nervous.
A branch was one thing. But what if Drex Valen himself went there?
Of course, Drex had no intention of going.
China had S.H.I.E.L.D.-style containnt of its own, in the form of the Superhuman Bureau, and they kept both heroes and villains on a very short leash. Even the Mandarin, Iron Man's enemy, had been driven out because he could not stay there.
The Chinese side welcod Blade Technology Industries openly. They even told them they could choose any city they wanted, and that they would be given land for the branch base.
The United States secretly cursed the move as shaless.
Then they countered.
They offered Blade Technology Industries a plot of land in New York at half price, along with a collection of advanced instrunts as a bonus.
When Drex heard that, his expression turned strange.
A plot in New York?
No chance.
That place had bad luck written into the soil. A cursed dump where insurance companies seed to go bankrupt for sport.
And Blade Technology Industries was now thousands of tis bigger than before, but its headquarters was still in Washington, D.C.
Uld had not expected his boss to pull sothing like that, and before long other countries started piling in too. One after another, they offered Blade Technology Industries free land inside their borders. So offered seventy-year rights. So offered outright ownership for as long as the company existed. So even promised to handle all construction themselves.
That left the United States in a very awkward position.
Luckily, Drex Valen had no interest in accepting those offers either. In China, he only sent Uld to negotiate. Drex already knew that leaving the United States through normal channels would probably be impossible for him anyway. Customs would choke on him and never let him through.
Then, in the middle of this delicate and increasingly ridiculous situation, with Blade Technology Industries having replaced Stark Industries as the most important industrial group in the United States, Drex received an invitation from A.I.M.
A.I.M. stood for Advanced Idea chanics.
In other words, Advanced Idea chanics was the full na. Their Chinese na was Pioneer Technology.
If that still did not ring a bell, A.I.M. was the company from Iron Man 3 that developed the Extremis virus. That was the movie version. In the comics, A.I.M. was led by M.O.D.O.K., not Aldrich Killian.
Drex looked at the eting request Aldrich Killian had sent him.
He claid he had a project involving human DNA and wanted to discuss cooperation.
Extremis, then.
This was eight years before the movie tiline. Killian was probably still in the process of developing the virus. Then he had likely run into Maya Hansen, the woman who had had a one-night stand with Tony years earlier, and gotten hold of the equation Tony had once scribbled down casually. That pushed the Extremis project forward.
Which ant that no matter how much Killian hated the humiliation Tony had once given him, he still had to swallow his pride and seek help from Tony Stark.
That was probably the cruelest joke in the whole thing.
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