Best of Intentions: Iron Man (ch. 29)

Heads up: I rewrote a portion of chapter 28 regarding the events of what would happen in Resident Evil 4. Originally, Leon and Ada dealt with it largely off-screen, but that has been changed to Rude's Big Brother system, catching an alert.

...

“So-” Chris began over a private channel as we prepared for departure. 

“No,” I cut him off, going through the checklist to make sure that I didn't climb into what amounted to a coffin and throw myself out of an airplane that was on the edge of the stratosphere. The Bus had gone through three revisions, making it the Bus 3.0. Faster, sleeker, perfect invisibility and more firepower than most of the world's collective military. I was pretty proud of it. 

Almost as proud as I was of the Javelin Armor I was doing a few safety checks. Anthem was an objective failure of a video game, but the idea of it was so cool. Exo-armor without all that bulk and mass, leaving sleek and humanoid. When I had been puzzling out the Cast-Off Armor, I turned to my memories for inspiration and I settled on Anthem. It was perfect for that -- just climb in, pressurize, and you're good to go. 

“You don't even know what I'm going to say,” Chris pouted. 

“I can guess,” I replied. Every Javelin came custom made, but all of them had a baseline number of enchantments and abilities. The armor was a half inch thick of adamantine-graphine alloy, making in neigh indestructible, invisibility cloak, more firepower than God, and it was all tied off with a bow by the fact that the armor was considered an ‘Arcane Firearm’ by my class. It was durable, it was strong, and it was fast. 

I had to do some tweaks on the fly because of my new Epic Level -- choosing the Wizard spell list was the obvious choice, but despite being level 25, I didn't have any 9th level spells. I just got my first 8th. Reworking my entire spell list had been a chore, mostly because of choice paralysis. 

“No, you can't,” Chris argued. 

“You were going to say ‘something something you and Jill, sitting in a tree, K-I-” I started, and he barked a laugh. 

“Yeah, okay, you got me,” he admitted without a hint of shame. “Just saying that you can't exactly be throwing stones at Leon and Ada, is all.” 

My hands paused briefly before I finished the load out. “The job isn't done,” I replied. There were a lot of things that I could say, but that was the heart of the matter. 

It had taken years, but Jill had convinced me that I was smarter than the average idiot. If only barely. I wasn't oblivious to the… feelings between us, but neither of us acted on them, simply because we knew that there wasn't a point. So long as Umbrella was out there, in whatever form they choose to take, that happy ending of… setting down with a white picket fence, having cookouts and living a quiet, easy life was impossible. So long as it was possible that someone was going to pull the trigger and end the damn world, neither of us would rest easily. 

Even with all my tech, there had been close calls. The T-Virus and its growing list of subvariants being released and used. Sometimes with tactical precision. Other times, someone released it just to see how much damage they could do -- New York, Miami, Beijing, Tokyo, Paris, London. All of them had outbreaks, some bigger than others. In the past five years, the world has faced the business end of a loaded gun with a hair trigger. 

Neither of us talked about it. Never really confronted it, but we both understood, even if it went unspoken. We couldn't do what we needed to do if we stopped. If we slowed. Saving the world wasn't something you could half-ass. And while we couldn't do anything about the general stupidity that leads to people trying to end the world… once we removed one particular bullet from the gun? 

That was our part done. 

Then what went unsaid could be spoken. 

“Plus,” I continued, “you don't have any room to talk.” 

“I'm married to the job,” Chris admitted easily. “That suits me just fine. Not really the case for you. Or Jill. Or Claire and Leon,” he rattled off. “No shame in that, you know?” 

“I know,” I replied, satisfied with the load out and system check. There was a hiss of air as the Javelin opened from the back, letting me climb inside. The armor was a bit like a suit, form-fitting except bigger. The Javelin pressurized around me, then, when I gave a green light, the room we were in depressurized as well. “But neither of us are the type the let go of the wheel. When we finally live in a world where a single mad scientist can't end it with one wrong experiment? Maybe that can change.” 

“Hm. If you say so,” Chris said, clearly having his doubts. Couldn't blame him there. There was a part of me that honestly wondered if I would ever be content to take my hands off the driver wheel and trust someone else to steer. But that was a question that could only be answered in the moment, when it came time to step away from my work. For now? It was time to take one step closer to that ever-so-distant finish line. 

“I say so,” I said, getting the last word in. Then, through the HUD, I watched as the door to the outside of the Bus slid open, revealing a sight that never got old. 

The view from this high up was better than any picture from the space station could provide. The earth was still massive from this height, some three thousand miles in the air, but the curve of the earth had been revealed. The swirl of the white clouds, the continents that a map couldn't capture the scale of. It also hadn't prepared me for just how blue the Earth was. 

“I wish we hadn't been talked out of the moon base,” Chris remarked to me, echoing my own thoughts. “Can’t buy a view like that.” That was a fight that I had allowed myself to be bullied into submission by ‘common sense’ and ‘practicality’ and ‘the moon is really far away from the Earth, how are we supposed to react in time.’ Peh. 

The first thing that I did once Umbrella was truly dead and gone was to slice myself some premium real estate on the moon- 

No. Shouldn’t think thoughts like that. That was practically raising a death flag. 

“Not yet,” I replied instead, before the two of us floated out of the Bus, drifting away from it before the HUD calculated our descent. “You can't buy a view like that yet.” 

Chris snorted as the thrusters in our suits angled us, and I got a look at his -- Chris opted for a bulkier model around eight feet tall, more armor, and more guns. He was a man after my own heart with his approach of more dakka. The only reason why I went with a slimmer model of just under seven feet was because my magic gave me a lot more options. “I suppose you'll need a hobby.” 

Wasn't wrong there, but there wasn't anyone time to reply as the trajectory was calculated and we were on our way. The thrusters flared up, sending us speeding down at high speeds. A Barrier acted as a windshield, but the speeds never got high enough for a dramatic scorched reentry. Had to stay hidden that way -- the various superpowers were wising up to our tricks and put more and more sensitive equipment in orbit to catch us. I hacked it all, of course, but the moment they realized that, they would shuffle the deck again. 

Our descent took us towards a rural village in Spain, one located near the Pyrenees Mountains. I had all the intel reports, and it was one of those small towns that died out because of a highway. It used to be bigger, it used to be important, but then a highway shaved off thirty minutes of a commute and no one gave it a second thought. It still limped along, clinging to life as it fell further and further from relevancy. 

The village itself came into view within a minute of our descent, our speed tapering off to avoid any visual indication of our arrival. It really wasn't much. About a dozen or so houses located in a cluster around a church with a castle looming in the background. It had been decades since the last census, but our records put less than three hundred people living in the area, with about a third of that operating in the castle itself. The only work to be found, and the only reason why the village hadn't been forgotten about entirely was a local mine but even that seemed to be drying up. 

We landed on a cliff overlooking the area, my HUD marking everyone out and doing scans to check their health. And, what I saw wasn't great. Elevated temperature, sluggishness, and when I switched to X-Ray vision, I saw the source of the ailments. 

“Looks like the G-Virus,” I remarked, seeing an anomalous mass that was attached to the brain. The tendrils were dug deep, branding out until every region of the brain was affected. 

“Is it?” Chris asked, the casualness of his voice gone like smoke in the wind as he got into position. “It and the T-Virus were the only types to make it out of Raccoon City.” 

That was an unfortunate truth. There were moments when I almost wish Raccoon City had been nuked, as it was hard to beat that in destroying all traces of the virus located in the city. In the years since, it had been under quarantine and scourged and sanitized -- yet, samples went missing. Not all of the various Neo-Umbrellas were equipped with samples that they had before the collapse. Some had gotten their samples from what came out of Raccoon City, despite whatever safety checks were put in place. 

The T-Virus was by far the most prevalent of the two, but the G-Virus reared its ugly head on more than one occasion. 

“If it is, it's been curated,” I answered. The G-Virus was the least popular because to get it to function properly, you needed compatible DNA markers for the host to pass onto. If you didn't, you end up with what I encountered at the Hives -- a weird tentacle monster. But, some people were into that and if all they cared about was causing chaos and racking up a kill count? Then it'd do. 

That wasn't to say that people hadn't tried picking up the torch that William Birkin had dropped to his weird, fucked up, and convoluted finishline.

“It's only targeting the brain, and it's spread throughout the village,” I continued. “I'd need a sample to confirm it, but I'm inclined to say that this is something else.” 

“The brain? Meaning…?” 

“Yeah,” I confirmed grimly. “Just eyeballing it, I can tell they're being puppeted. Still alive, so the damage can be undone, though. But I hope they don't remember their time as infected,” I said, switching my priorities around. Saving them was, frankly, a huge pain in the ass but letting people die because it was inconvenient to help them wasn't how I did things. I had god-like power by this point and I was going to use it. 

“Roger Roger," Chris replied, a certain terseness to his voice. He understood the mission just got more complicated. “Well, we have Umbrella activity at the castle. I'm guessing that's where we want to be.” 

I looked over at the castle itself and saw that there were a few hundred people within -- most were likely Umbrella soldiers. One of them in particular… 

“Does it make sense for them to roll out the red carpet if they're on the trail of something big?” Chris asked me after a beat of silence as we both prepared for the next part of the mission. 

No, it didn't. For the past five years, we had been kicking the stuffing out of Umbrella. We were there to foil every plot, we hunted them to the ends of the Earth, and every time they poked their heads out of their hides holes, we came down on them with extreme prejudice and overwhelming fire power. Not once had Umbrella had ever come remotely close to defeating us. The score board was one hundred to nil. 

So, the sudden burst of confidence was alarming. I figured that they would have puzzled out how we were tracking them, and I understood that they were adapting to our methods. But this? This was new. This was confidence that they could handle whatever we threw at them. 

Yet, the stakes were just high enough that we couldn't afford to not play ball. 

“No. Does that change anything?” I asked Chris as we got ready to move. 

“Not in the slightest,” Chris replied before we both exploded into action. 

I went low while Chris went high, heading to the castle while I swept through the village instead. As I did so, ports opened up on my back as I Iron Man flew through the sleepy village, the infected inhabitants barely taking awareness of me until it was far too late. As I sped through the village, I left a wave of micro-missiles around the size of a pencil eraser that darted out from the ports and zeroed in on their targets. 

The villagers were hit, even if they happened to be standing behind a wall or were otherwise out of sight. The missiles struck them near the heart or on the neck, delivering a fast acting paralytic that would immobilize them for around six hours -- long enough for us to clean up whatever Umbrella's plot here was and begin the process of hitting them with Greater Restoration until they were as good as new. 

Meanwhile, Chris arrived with the grace and subtlety of a wrecking ball at the castle -- he Kool-Aid Manned through a wall and started shooting. His twin shoulder mounted railguns fired in unison, tearing through the castle down to the foundation while his hard points and hand guns fired with deadly precision at the Umbrella forces guarding the castle.

In another life, I could see this whole attack being a huge hassle. If it was one of the games? Oh, it'd be a slog through the village, jumping through hoops and puzzles to reach the castle, and hunting down clues to whatever particular brand of madness the unlucky protagonist was dealing with. I could almost see it behind my eyes as I left a subdued village behind and flew towards the castle by banking over a large lake to destroy whatever assets Umbrella had along the perimeter of the castle. 

But we had jumped genres the moment we left Raccoon City. We weren't in a survival horror game any longer. 

We were in an action shooter with a tech advantage of about fifty tech generations. 

It was outrageously simple to bank around the castle, sending out missiles and explosive slugs at whatever assets Umbrella brought with them. The Umbrella operatives fired back where they could, but even if I stood still and allowed them to mag dump into me, the most they could hope to accomplish was to scratch the paint. But I wouldn't even allow them to do that much. 

With ruthless accuracy, the Umbrella resistance was crushed outside of the castle while Chris crushed the resistance within it. By the time I reached the courtyard, five minutes had passed since our arrival, and by all appearances, the situation was dealt with. Another clean decisive victory. 

At least until I got an alert on my HUD a split second before I saw Chris erupt from the castle wall. At first, I assumed that he couldn’t find a door, but when he smashed into the ground with enough force to carve a line through the courtyard? My guard was all the way up as I zeroed in on the figure emerging from the hole that Chris just erupted from. 

He was tall, around six and a half feet, with unwashed gray hair and an unkempt gray beard. He wore a battered and well-worn beige trench coat that was left open, revealing a simple pair of pants, a white button-down that was half untucked, and a pair of boots that had a few miles left in them before they came undone. 

“Neat toys,” He remarked, shouldering a sizable fantasy-looking warhammer made out of solid steel. He adjusted a wide-brimmed hat to look up at me, “Miranda was right. If you live long enough, you really do see the most incredible things.” He possessed a vague German accent, a ghost of a trace at most, but it was enough for me to track down his origins if needed.

“I’m guessing you’re the reason Umbrella feels so confident about their chances?” I asked him out loud while sending a message to Chris. He was awake and picking himself back up, and his response was swift. 

‘I don’t know what he hit me with. One moment I’m fine, and the next I’m flying through walls.’ Not exactly what I wanted to hear, but it was enough to make me wary. Since I created the Javelins, the operations had gotten easy, so anything that could manhandle them found itself at the very top of my ‘delete from reality’ list. 

“Ahm… yeah, suppose that’d be the right of it,” the man said with a bob of his head, sounding almost uncertain. “The name is Heisenberg. You that Rude fella?” 

He struck me as a dumb muscle type, rather than a mastermind. Maybe not stupid, though that remained to be seen, but he wasn’t here of his own volition. Someone told him to be here -- maybe my arch nemesis, or maybe this Miranda person. They could be operating as an alliance, or I was dealing with a third party. 

Either way, any friend of my enemy is also my enemy, so with very little hesitation, I took aim with my shoulder-mounted railgun and fired.

The slug raced forward at speeds that shattered the sound barrier, yet it wasn’t fast enough. Heisenberg didn’t move a muscle, yet I watched as the slug curved its trajectory enough that it missed him by an entire foot, smashing through the castle with explosive force. Enough of the supports were knocked out because the top half of the castle began to collapse inward, sending up a great plume of dust. 

“Rude,” Heisenberg said, and I wasn’t sure if he was saying my name or making a remark before something weird happened. An invisible force grabbed hold of my Javelin, forcing me down into the ground before I could fly off. Even as I hit the dirt, I was analyzing the data -- it wasn’t gravity, and it wasn’t telekinesis. It was… 

“Ah. A homeless-looking Magneto,” I realized, seeing that the magnetic fields of my suit had been manipulated. I’d call that an oversight on my part, but I was calling bullshit on whatever virus he was hopped up on giving superpowers. Still, half a decade of dealing with Umbrella’s special brand of bullshit had left me strangely well equpied on how to handle it. 

There was a hiss of air as my Javelin cracked open, and I emerged from it just as Heisenberg tried to pull me with it towards him. Taking my glasses out of a case and sliding them on, the dust was immediately filtered out of my vision as I saw the man take a swing with his hammer at the now-empty Javelin. The armor held out, but there were hairline fractures at the point of impact. 

Magnetism and superstrength.

“Interesting,” I admitted, raising my Arcane Firearm and pulling the trigger. The bullet struck center mass, engulfing Heisenberg in an Incendiary Cloud -- my 8th-level spell of choice. Through the dust, there was a sudden explosion of heat that I could feel on my face despite being fifty yards away. The appearance of the cloud was strange. It looked like a continuous contained explosion that churned within a twenty-foot radius. 

But, beyond the sound of rubble falling from the collapsing castle, I heard Heisenberg screaming an inhuman scream. 

“Rude?!” Chris exclaimed, and through my glasses, I brought up what he was seeing. Beyond the collapsing castle, something was emerging from the rubble, revealing a passage way that looked like it had been carved through the bedrock of the castle recently. Spilling forth from the passage way… 

“Werewolves?” I muttered, not quite sure what to make of this. Large, hairy, and very wolfy. They ran on all fours with inhuman grace, hopping between unstable rubble and spilling towards me in a flood. “Chris, you’re good to cut and run. I’m not liking the look of this,” I said, and Chris visibly hesitated for just a moment, the action translating through his Javelin. 

But then he recalled something. 

“If you say so,” Chris said, swallowing his natural objections before his Javelin flew up and away, leaving me behind as I continued to scorch Heisenberg as he attempted to flee the Incendiary Cloud. Not much luck there, however, as I made sure that it stuck to him like glue. It was hurting him, but it also seemed to become less effective the longer I burned him. 

Adaptive regeneration, superstrength, and magnetism control?

I stepped forward, detonating my Javelin with an eyesearing explosion that blasted away the dust. Thirty or so of the werewolves were caught in the explosion, but the others that poured up from the secret tunnel didn’t seem to mind in the slightest. There were hundreds of them, which told me that everything leading up to Heisenberg had been a prelude. 

Casting Blade Barrier on myself at the cost of dropping Incendiary Cloud on Heisenberg, I saw the man had been scorched black, yet he was regenerating at a frankly alarming rate. New flesh bubbled up from underneath with enough force that the charred muscle and skin cracked off and fell, like he was shedding an exoskeleton. When his eyes regenerated, there was a burning fury in them that told me I had secured my spot at the top of his shit list.

Chainlightning cackled at my fingertips before I flung it at the nearest werewolf, which lunged at me. The lightning bolt struck three other wolves, while the others pressed on. They met Blade Barrier and were immediately shredded by the spectral swords that kept them at bay while I fired Fire Bolt at the others. 

But it was then that my Arcane Firearm was ripped from my grasp -- not so much as taken from me, but dismantled in my hand by Heisenberg. Irritating, but survivable. At least it was until I saw every scrap of metal rising up from the castle, which was only rubble by now, the rusted steel and iron twisting and sharpening until they became needle-point spears. 

Right. Not taking my chances with that. 

Just as the hundreds of spears rained down upon me, I dropped Blade Barrier and cast Otiluke’s Resilient Shere, and burned a Metamagic point to make it last a full twenty-four hours. As the orb engulfed me, a split second later, the spears struck. They bounced off the shimmering surface of the sphere, though they had greater luck skewering the werewolves that still bounded forward without anything resembling a self-preservation instinct.

The assault lasted about thirty seconds with Heisenberg trying to force his way through the barrier, and as he lumbered closer, I saw the intensity of his ire grow. By the time he arrived before me, there was a smile on his face even as murder gleamed in his eyes. 

“Well,” he began with forced friendliness, “I suppose that explains why Mother Miranda wanted to get her hands on you. Those nanomachine stuff is something else, hm?” He remarked, placing a hand on the barrier and giving it a little shove, forcing it to roll. I kept myself standing, but his smirk grew a fraction. “But, it looks like you put yourself in a corner. She wants you alive… and you can be damn sure if anyone can get through this, it’d be here, bubble boy.”

Then, with a kick, he sent the barrier flying away a good hundred feet. I didn’t mind the impact, and if anything, I was glad for it. I might have started cracking up. 

After all, there was nothing quite like a plan going off without a hitch.