Fury was already shouting into his phone before the first full ring of drones had finished closing around Stark and Noctis.
From the command post screen, the two men could not have looked more different if they had planned it for a poster photo. Tony was holding a position through armour, power, and visible strain. Even at this distance, Fury could read the tension in his posture. Stark was ready for a fight and hated half the reasons it had arrived. Lucius, by contrast, hovered in the air as though gravity had simply decided not to bother him tonight.
The area around the Expo was filling fast.
SHIELD vehicles were arriving. Local law enforcement was moving in from the outer roads. Federal teams were trying to make themselves useful on camera before anyone could ask why they had not prevented this. Emergency services and local forces were pulling civilians away from the obvious kill zone. Every organisation with a badge, a radio, or a budget suddenly wanted to shine under the lights.
SHIELD wanted something more specific.
Their reputation had been rotting in public for months, and now a popular billionaire and the poor mutant entrepreneur whom the public had adopted as a mistreated miracle worker were both floating over a death trap in front of half the country. If SHIELD could be seen helping here, if they could save Stark and Noctis, and look competent while doing it, some of the damage might finally stop spreading.
Fury did not believe in miracles, but he believed in optics.
"Lock down the outer ring," he snapped into the phone. "I want civilians pulled back another hundred yards. Get air support held outside the active zone until I say otherwise. No one fires into that formation without my order. If anybody guesses and hits Stark or Noctis, I will bury the report in their lungs."
On another line, Hill was already coordinating evacuation routes. Coulson was somewhere closer to the ground, trying to keep three separate agencies from helping themselves into catastrophe. Romanoff had eyes on the upper levels and the crowd flow. Barton, positioned with a rifle and no belief whatsoever that the night would stay simple, tracked the sky through his scope and waited for targets to become legitimate.
Above all of them, the drones kept closing.
-
Lucius glanced at Tony over one shoulder.
"How do you want to deal with these things?"
He had already taken the systems apart in his mind. The drones, Hammer's clumsy networking, Vanko's intrusion path, the signal hierarchy, the command layer, and the redundancies had all opened to him like a flower. He had also located Vanko before the man ever showed himself again in his second kinky little whip suit.
War Machine was off the board now. Mark II sat under JARVIS control again, which meant Vanko had lost one of his cleanest advantages.
For Lucius, that simplified the evening beautifully. It was time to rise and shine.
He wrapped an invisible telekinetic shield around himself as casually as another man might shrug on a coat. Then he turned his head towards Tony and sent the question directly into his mind.
'Want one?' He sent images of the telekinetic shield along with the question.
The voice slid into Tony's head with smug clarity and a tone that suggested Lucius was offering sunscreen on a sunny beach rather than a live combat advantage.
Tony's eyebrows rose behind the faceplate.
He turned his helmet towards Lucius and had a very strong urge to slap that grin off his face.
'How much?' Tony thought about the answer and watched the fruit wizard.
Lucius's smile widened.
'I'm sure we can come to an understanding. You are, as you so movingly informed me earlier, my very best friend.'
Tony nearly swore aloud.
Even now. Even with armed drones closing in, a panicking crowd below, and the entire Expo turning into an international security incident, the bastard could not help negotiating mid-rescue.
'Fine.'
Lucius sealed the shield over him as well.
Tony felt it at once. The telekinetic shield had no weight; it was simply just there, like a slight pressure, a field hugging the suit close enough to follow movement and wide enough to absorb nasty surprises.
"I hate you a little," Tony muttered.
Lucius heard it through the helmet speaker and looked delighted.
"I love you too, my most important friend."
-
Stryker did not bother pretending patience now.
Lady Deathstrike stood ready, perfectly still except for the smallest tension in her hands. Jason Stryker's eyes had taken on that faraway look that meant he was already halfway into somebody else's mind, whether or not he had started yet. Leech waited with handlers around him and confusion on his face, because that was the ugliest part of Stryker's operations. He could turn a child into equipment and still call himself righteous afterwards.
"Hold," Stryker said.
Ross did not like that he was taking orders from a colonel outside his chain, but he liked missing an opportunity even less.
"We move when Noctis is busy," Stryker continued. "Not before."
Ross kept his eyes on the screen.
"Then pray he stays busy."
Stryker's mouth tightened.
"I don't pray for things I intend to arrange, General."
--
The first volley came from the lower ring, angled badly enough that the real threat was not to Tony and Lucius but to everyone still trying to clear out beneath them.
Tony saw it and shot up.
Lucius came with him.
Without any obvious cue between them, both men drove hard into the sky, pulling the engagement away from the crowd and forcing the drones to follow. The formation broke upward. Muzzle flashes cut through the air behind them. Below, the Expo floor shrank into lights, smoke, and bodies scattering for cover.
On the SHIELD feed, Fury watched their angle change and understood the decision immediately.
"At least they make a brain when combined," he muttered.
The airborne drones climbed after them in a screaming metal pack.
Tony kept going higher, forcing the ring wider and drawing the upper units with him. Shots raked towards him from every direction at once.
They hit the telekinetic shield and scattered.
Rounds flattened, ricocheted, and burst away from him like rain striking invisible glass. Repulsor fire licked along the field and broke off into jagged sprays of light. Tony glanced down at his armour readouts, saw the impact patterns refusing to translate into damage, and laughed once despite himself.
"Oh, that is nice."
Lucius heard him.
"You're welcome."
Two drones came in from the side. Tony rolled, cut one in half with a repulsor burst, and shoulder checked the other hard enough to send it tumbling out of formation. More fire came at him from behind. The shield caught it all again, turning what should have been a brutal swarm into a series of angry, useless impacts around his body.
For the first time that night, Tony got to enjoy himself.
Below him, Lucius stopped flying.
He dropped.
The plummet was abrupt enough to make every camera trying to follow the upper engagement stutter and readjust. He came down through the lower drone ring like a stone with intent, coat snapping round him, expression calm, one hand already lifting as he judged distance, mass, and timing.
Before he hit the ground, he stopped dead in the air.
The nearest ground drones were already aiming at him.
Then Lucius clenched his hand.
-
Metal screamed.
Three drones at once folded inwards under crushing telekinetic pressure. Limbs snapped, plating bent, weapon mounts twisted, and the whole lot collapsed into one dense ball of torn steel and ruined machinery. He did it again with the next cluster. Then again. And again. Two here. Three there. Another pair dragged together and compacted until nothing remained but weight and a new spherical shape.
He moved through them with the calm control of a man correcting bad machinery.
By the time he rose again, at least twenty great iron spheres floated round him in an orbit, each one made from multiple drones ground into compressed ammunition.
On the ground, police, SHIELD agents, reporters, and the last civilians still staring in disbelief all stopped long enough to look up.
Lucius ascended through smoke and light with his metal artillery hanging round him like private moons.
Then he started firing.
The first ball shot upward so fast it vanished for a fraction of a second and reappeared only when it punched through an airborne drone and carried the wreckage with it into a second. The collision blew both out of formation in a shower of sparks, twisted alloy, and burning fragments.
The second iron ball took a drone broadside and reduced it to scrap in mid-air.
The third smashed straight up through one climbing unit and clipped another at the edge of the explosion, sending both into a spiralling fall.
He did not throw them wildly.
Each telekinetic shot carried intent, angle, and obscene force. Some balls punched through targets. Others clipped, ricocheted, and found a second victim. One went bowling through a line of three lighter drones, tearing the first apart, smashing the second sideways, and crumpling the third into a spinning wreck before curving back on Lucius's pull to rejoin the orbit for another pass.
Tony watched one of those shots go past beneath him and whistled.
"Show off."
Lucius looked up at him from below and to one side, framed by hovering iron and burning drone wrecks.
"Yes."
-
Television crews locked onto him almost instantly.
The major American channels had already broken into rolling coverage because the Expo had turned into live combat in one of the most media-saturated cities on the planet, and every producer in the country now understood they were watching the sort of footage that made careers.
On one network, the anchor leaned into the chaos with the breathless confidence of a man who knew he was about to be clipped endlessly for highlights.
"We are watching live pictures from the Stark Expo, where Justin Hammer's drone presentation has turned into an active attack. You can now see Tony Stark in the air in his Iron Man suit, and just below him, yes, that is Lucius Noctis, the same mutant entrepreneur whose treatment by SHIELD triggered international outrage only months ago."
A second commentator, sounding halfway between stunned and thrilled, cut in over the live feed.
"And look at that. He's not just engaging the flying units. He's prioritising the drones closer to the ground. He pulled the fight away from the civilians first, then crushed the lower machines into those metal balls. He's clearing the danger nearest the crowd before going after the higher targets."
On another channel, the host sounded even more excited about it.
"That's another one. Good Lord, he just sent that robot into next week. And that one's gone too. Folks, if you are just joining us, Lucius Noctis is publicly known as the potion maker at the centre of the ongoing SHIELD scandal, the man who shares product free of charge every month for people in need, especially children, and now he is up there swatting combat drones out of the sky like this is batting practice."
The co-anchor spoke over footage of another iron sphere detonating one drone and clipping another.
"And that is a strike. Absolutely a strike. He's firing those compressed metal balls like artillery rounds."
A field reporter on yet another feed could barely keep his voice level.
"We've seen multiple civilians already pulled clear of the lower danger zone, and now Noctis is taking out the airborne units in sequence. Whatever else people think of him politically, this is a rescue effort in real time. The public only knew him as the philanthropic mutant businessman and victim of SHIELD abuse. Tonight, we are seeing his heroic side as well."
-
Another iron ball was launched.
It curved through the night and smashed one drone apart so hard that the commentator actually laughed in shock.
"Oh, that's another one. That's a clean hit. He is running the score up now."
Around Tony, the shield kept doing its job.
Repulsor fire, machine gun bursts, and wild drone shots kept slamming into the invisible layer and bursting away from him in flashes that would have shredded armour plating under ordinary circumstances. Instead, they glittered, deflected, and died.
Tony banked through the gaps Lucius's artillery kept opening, cut one drone with a palm blast, drove through the wreckage, and almost grinned inside the helmet.
"Fruit monster, how much is this going to cost me if I want this armour again?"
Lucius answered in his head at once.
Friendship rates are still under negotiation.
Tony almost laughed.
That was the problem with the bastard. Even during a televised air battle, he could still sound like a man writing an invoice.
-
Below the fight, Fury's phone had not stopped.
"Keep those channels clean," he barked at one line. "I don't care what senator wants commentary, I want the damn civilians out and the feeds tracked. Somebody find me the uplink source on Vanko's control layer and do it before Stark or Noctis turn this into a personal hobby."
He cut that call, answered another, and did not take his eye off the screen.
By the time Natasha had found the control centre, all the drones were already down.
-
Ross watched from his end with something closer to awe than he would ever admit aloud. Stryker watched with calculation sharpened by frustration. Every second Noctis stayed in control of the sky made the kidnapping harder.
"Now?" Ross asked.
Stryker did not answer immediately.
His team waited. Lady Deathstrike was ready to move. Jason's eyes were already unfocused. Leech remained the ugly answer to powers if they could only get him close enough.
But Noctis was not cornered.
He was thriving.
"Not yet," Stryker said at last.
Ross swore softly.
Above the Expo, another iron sphere launched and took two more drones out in quick succession. The commentator shouted over the footage with the kind of excited disbelief sports broadcasters usually save for postseason miracles.
"And he knocks another one out of the park. That's two more off the board. Noctis is putting on an absolute clinic up there."
One by one, the airborne drones vanished.
Some Tony killed with firepower and fury. Most Lucius erased with force, weight, and contempt. The sky cleared in ragged patches until burning wrecks were all that remained of Vanko's air support.
At last, the final airborne unit lost both engines, spun out, and dropped behind the Expo grounds in a trail of sparks.
Tony descended first, boots touching down hard on a scarred section of platform with the suit hissing around him.
Lucius stayed where he was, floating above the scene with the last few iron spheres still hovering around him like obedient threats.
Then Vanko dropped in.
His new armour hit the stage with brutal weight and a burst of crackling energy that made every camera on site swing to him at once.
Below, Tony looked up and above, Lucius smiled.