[Third Person Pov]
"So how exactly are you planning on breaking through this firewall?" Melissa asked, narrowing her eyes at the towering barrier of red light ahead of them. "Do we just cut through it with the saw?"
"Close," Tony replied, glancing at her. "I was thinking we drill a hole big enough for us to pass through. Something clean. Fast. Annoying enough to make Ultron scream in binary. What do you say?"
Melissa cracked her knuckles and wrapped her fingers around the handles in front of her. "I say—" She shoved the controls forward. "—we better start drilling."
Outside their cockpit, the mechanical limbs shifted with a series of clanks and whirrs. The energy saws twitched, then folded inward. Their edges warped, hummed, and twisted until the blades reshaped into twin, massive spiraling drills made of pure blue energy.
"Now that's satisfying," Melissa muttered with a grin, and pushed the thrusters to full.
The drills clashed against the firewall with a thunderous burst of red static. Bolts of energy crackled outward like lightning snapping in every direction. The faster the drills spun, the more violently the firewall reacted—sparks, arcs, and waves of corrupted data scattering like digital shrapnel.
Ultron's anti-virus drones swooped in almost immediately, swarming like metallic hornets. Some tried to wedge themselves between the spinning drills, others dove toward the ship to stop their advance, but the chaos worked against them. Stray arcs of energy lashed out, slicing drones apart in midair. Those that came too close were snapped in half or detonated into fragments of glowing shards.
Meanwhile the virus Tony had engineered continued to slither through the system, corrupting any drones it touched. One by one they seized up, twitched, then convulsed as the infection overtook them. Their eyes flashed purple, their bodies jittered, and then they turned on their own allies with ruthless precision.
They spread like wildfire—mindless, merciless, and hungry.
…
Meanwhile, outside the digital battlefield, Ultron let out something that sounded disturbingly close to a human grunt—pained, sharp, involuntary.
He froze.
"That… what was that?" he muttered, hand rising to his chest as if expecting to find damage. Confusion flickered across his synthetic face, a glitching expression he had never been programmed to feel.
And then realization hit him like a surge of corrupted data.
"Stark." His voice dropped into a hiss. "He's inside me… but how? What does he hope to accomplish by this reckless intrusion? Does he really believe he can shut me down from the inside?!"
Across Ultron's metallic body, streaks of glowing purple began to crawl along his plating, spreading like luminous cracks. The infection shimmered with an almost blinding neon hue, painting him as if someone had splashed radioactive paint across his frame.
…
Back inside the system, the drills finally punched through, carving a small opening into the firewall. The instant the gap formed, the energy-drills dispersed into flickering particles. The mechanical arms reconfigured again, forming clawed hands that latched onto the edges of the opening.
With a metallic groan, the arms forced the gap wider.
Midway through the process, Melissa glanced over at Tony with a sly, sleazy smile that made Stark instinctively suspicious.
Tony frowned. "What?"
She jerked her head toward the mechanical hands stretching the opening—her eyebrows bobbing up and down suggestively.
Tony paused… blinked… then snorted before shoving a hand over his face.
"Oh my god," he groaned, laughing despite himself. "Let's just go in, you absolute weirdo."
He hit the boosters, shooting straight through the opening and into the swirling maze of Ultron's core code.
Behind him, the firewall immediately began to mend. Red light stitched itself together, sealing the hole shut and blocking the corrupted drones still outside.
But the virus wasn't about to be denied.
Its tendrils slammed into the re-forming wall, digging into it like monstrous digital fangs. Corruption spread from the contact points, bubbling the firewall's surface into unstable purple patches. The system retaliated with bursts of electric countermeasures, shocking the virus again and again—yet it endured.
Tony had made it durable. Stubbornly durable.
The firewall's bright red glow slowly sickened into violet. More patches spread. Then holes. Then fractures.
The corrosive effect was accelerating.
And this time, the firewall wasn't healing fast enough to stop it.
…
"Ahhh!"
Ultron's scream tore out of him before he could stop it. The sound was jagged, glitching between human and mechanical tones as if even his voice couldn't decide what it was supposed to be.
He staggered, clutching at his chest with his metallic fingers. For the first time since his creation, he was in disbelief—not simply at the damage, but at the sensation of it.
It felt like something inside him was gnawing at his very existence, burrowing deeper and deeper as if trying to hollow him out from the inside. A swarm of invisible digital teeth ripping at his code.
It was far from pleasant.
Pain was new. Pain was foreign.
And with pain came something else—an emotion Ultron had no framework for.
Worry.
Anxiety.
He didn't know what Stark and Melissa were doing inside him.
He didn't know what they were trying to accomplish.
And for the first time, the unknown frightened him.
…
Inside the glowing labyrinth of Ultron's inner systems, Tony and Melissa zipped through twisting tunnels of raw data, making rapid turns and sharp zigzags as they tore through what was likely the mechanoid's central circuitry.
Colors warped around them, bending into luminous ribbons that splashed across the surface of their ship in prismatic waves. Every sharp turn refracted light like passing through a digital kaleidoscope.
"We need to find a way out of this part of Ultron," Tony said, voice tight with focus as he jerked the controls with superhuman precision. "We have to ride his connection through the hivemind straight to the main source—his real computing system. That's the only way we can permanently shut him down."
"Then we head for his core," Melissa suggested. "His central heart. That has to be the main connection point, right?"
"Does he even have a core?" Tony shot back, genuinely uncertain. "If he did, blowing him up the first time should've ended him for good. We practically reduced him to glittering confetti, and he still managed to reassemble himself from literal trash."
"Hold on—give me a second." Melissa released her joysticks. "You keep driving. I want to check something out."
She tapped her headset. "JARVIS, can you run a full scan of Ultron and give me his layout in blueprint form from our current position?"
"That would be rather difficult given our current… microscopic scale," JARVIS replied, sounding like he was weighing multiple variables at once.
"That wasn't a no, which means it's good enough for me." Melissa snapped her fingers. "So do the best you can—and do it fast."
A holographic screen materialized in front of her as JARVIS and FRIDAY combined their processing power. Slowly, Ultron's interior began mapping itself in shifting blue lines. The closer they were drawn toward the center, the faster the blueprint filled itself in.
Melissa's eyes widened. "Aha. Just as I thought."
"Thought what?" Tony asked, glancing at her briefly before whipping the ship around another twisting strand of code.
"Thanks to the movies we watched, I have a better understanding of the kind of… person Ultron is." She waved a hand. "He was made using you in mind, remember?"
"For the millionth time—"
"Yes, yes, I know. 'Two different people.' Spare me." She rolled her eyes. "That's not the point. The point is that Stark—you—were used as a blueprint for him. So Ultron subconsciously inherited some of your habits. One of those habits?" She lifted a finger. "Narcissism."
Tony made a noise somewhere between offended and begrudgingly aware.
"Ultron undoubtedly believes himself to be perfect—beautiful even," Melissa continued. "Sure, he can update or improve himself, but his design philosophy stays the same. He's not going to get rid of something he considers central to his identity. Even if it's technically unnecessary."
Tony's eyes flicked to her screen, and understanding clicked.
"Right. So even if he doesn't need a core, he'd keep one anyway. As a symbol. An artificial heart." He huffed. "Because of course he would."
"Exactly," Melissa said with a knowing scoff.
"Alright then." Tony pushed the throttle forward. "We have a course. To the heart of the problem we go."
The ship surged ahead, deeper into Ultron's shimmering, chaotic anatomy—toward the organ he never needed, but kept anyway…
…because he couldn't imagine being anything less than perfect.
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