Chapter 122: Iron Man vs. Spider-Man
Ethan crouched down to Harry's level.
"When you're choosing an opponent," he said, "observation comes first. You watched Pietro eat dinner. You didn't watch Pietro move."
Harry looked at the floor. "They're different things."
"Very different things." Ethan stood. "You know what you don't know now. That's worth something."
Harry thought about this for a moment. Then he nodded — not the quick nod of someone accepting comfort, but the slower one of someone filing information.
Across the room, Wade had materialized beside him and was in the process of delivering a lecture on how Pietro's power specifically counter-matched Harry's skill set and how this was basically a statistical anomaly that would never happen again and definitely wasn't representative of anything.
Harry listened with the expression of someone who understood the lecture was love wearing a different costume.
Peter stood at the center of the room and pulled on the mask.
Tony looked at it. "That's... homemade."
"It works," Peter said.
"If you can beat me, I'll build you something better."
Peter heard this with the part of his brain that logged useful information, and set it aside. Tony Stark offering to build him a suit was a remarkable incentive. It was also going to be irrelevant in the next five minutes if he didn't do something worth rewarding.
Jessica raised the stopwatch.
They moved.
Tony had made a practical decision about weapons.
He knew Peter had spider-powers — enhanced strength, wall-crawling, the reflexive early-warning system that Ethan had described as essentially unconscious prediction. What he didn't know was the upper range. So he started in close-quarters, where the suit's physical capabilities were the variable, and where any mistakes wouldn't involve shrapnel.
The first exchange was educational.
Peter moved the way people who had been trained by someone who actually knew what they were doing moved — not just fast, but efficient, each action consuming the minimum energy required and positioning him for the next action before the current one finished. He wasn't reacting to the suit; he was reading it. There was a difference, and Tony noticed it immediately.
The second exchange was more honest about the numbers.
Peter's strength, against the suit's force-amplified systems, was approximately equivalent. Not less than. Equivalent. Tony recalculated. He'd been operating on the assumption that the strength differential would let him anchor the fight. It wasn't going to anchor the fight.
The third exchange, Tony stopped holding back on the close-range repulsor work.
Peter read it coming. Not perfectly — he absorbed some of it — but he rolled with the deflection, put a web-line on the ceiling to redirect his trajectory, and came back from an angle the suit's predictive matrix hadn't fully accounted for.
Tony had a moment of genuine professional admiration, which he filed away for later.
Around the edges of the room, the audience had reorganized.
The casual conversation had stopped. People who had been divided into conversational clusters were now mostly watching the same thing.
Richard Fisk had navigated to Ethan's elbow.
"Can you teach me?" he said.
"Ask your father," Ethan said. "Most of what I know about fighting, I learned from him."
Richard looked at Fisk, who was standing nearby watching the fight with the expression of a craftsman evaluating work done in his tradition.
"Your technique," Fisk said to Ethan, without looking away from the fight. "Not your power. The footwork."
"Yes," Ethan said. "The footwork."
Fisk nodded once, satisfied.
Then, after a moment: "He's going to give Tony a real problem in the next thirty seconds."
"Yes," Ethan said.
Fisk nodded again. "Good."
"Tony," Ethan called across the room. "Stop worrying about hurting him. Full power. He can take it."
Tony looked over at Ethan for one second. One second was enough.
"Alright, kid," he said, and his voice had shifted — not harder, exactly, but more serious. The voice of someone who had decided to stop teaching and start competing. "I'm going full."
"Good," Peter said.
He fired three web-lines simultaneously — two anchors, one snare — and moved the moment he felt Tony's systems spin up to full output.
What followed was loud enough that the room's impact-absorbing walls had significant work to do.
The room watched.
It went on for nearly four minutes.
When it ended — with Peter having out-lasted four distinct suit configurations and Tony having landed a hit that Peter had read and partially redirected but not fully escaped — the outcome was close enough that nobody was entirely certain who had won until Jessica looked at the stopwatch and compared notes with the room's general consensus.
"Spider-Man," she announced, with the flat authority of a timekeeper who was not going to debate this. "On sustained engagement time."
Tony stood with the suit partially retracted, breathing slightly elevated, looking at Peter Parker with the expression of a man who had been given data he needed to process.
Peter pulled off the mask.
He looked at Tony.
Tony said: "Come to the lab sometime. I want to talk about what you did with the third web-line."
"Okay," Peter said.
"And I'm building you a suit."
Peter blinked. "I won."
"You also nearly got hit by a Mk. VII repulsor to the face and kept moving," Tony said. "That's information I want properly protected, not by whatever that is." He gestured at the mask. "Come to the lab."
From across the room, Ethan watched.
There it is, he thought.
☆☆☆
-> 20 Advanced chapters Now Available on Patreon!!
-> https://www.pat-reon.co-m/c/Inkshaper
(Just remove the hyphen (-) to access patreon normally)
If you like this novel please consider leaving a review that's help the story a lot Thank you