The warehouse district ran quiet enough that Clint almost trusted it, and he'd learned a long time ago that trusting quiet was usually the last mistake a guy made before the loud part started.
He and Natasha worked the perimeter low and fast, cutting toward the supply lines Tony had flagged. A drone broke formation early, swinging wide to flank them off a stack of shipping containers.
Clint put an arrow through its rotor before it cleared the second container. It spun out and dropped.
Two more came in behind it, low and fast, and Natasha was already moving, sliding under the first one's swing and driving a knife up through the gap in its plating. It seized and dropped. The second came in swinging for her exposed side, and she pivoted off her back foot, caught its arm, and used its own momentum to throw it into the container wall hard enough to cave the metal.
"Three more, north side," Clint called, already turning.
He put two down in the same breath, one through the optic sensor, one through the joint at its hip, and it folded sideways mid-stride. The third came in too fast for a clean shot, and he dropped the bow half a second, drove an elbow into its chassis to buy room, and finished it with a knife across the exposed wiring at its throat.
The drone line ahead of them held formation tight enough that Clint clocked the gap the second it showed.
"There." He already had the arrow nocked. "Same one we talked about."
He let it fly the moment the angle opened, and it landed dead center, the whole formation flickering and stalling like a bad connection trying to reboot itself.
"That's the window," Clint said. "Go."
Natasha was already moving, three steps in before something about the stutter snagged wrong in the back of her mind. Too even. Too uniform for a system that was actually failing.
"Clint, wait, that's not—"
She didn't get the rest of it out. Something came through the gap low and fast, no warning in it, and caught her across the ribs hard enough to lift her off her feet. She hit the ground rolling and came up already reaching for a weapon that wasn't there anymore, the impact having knocked it clean out of her hand.
Whatever had hit her wasn't chasing. It didn't need to. It was already standing exactly where she'd been about to be, and a second one came in behind it before she'd gotten her feet fully under her.
"Nat!" Clint was already moving, an arrow gone before he'd finished the word, catching the second drone mid-stride and buying her half a second that wasn't enough.
She got an arm up to block the next strike and felt something in it give wrong. She went down for real this time, and stayed down.
Clint dropped his bow without thinking twice, got an arm under her, and hauled her up, running because running was the only plan his body had left in it. A drone clipped his shoulder on the way past and he took the hit rather than slow down, teeth gritted, arm locked tight around her.
He made it two blocks, then three, her weight going heavier against his side with every stride, until the street ahead of him closed off in a way that told him plainly there wasn't a direction left that went anywhere but here. He set her down as gently as the situation allowed and stood over her instead of past her.
Out of arrows. Out of ground. One thing left to say.
"Come on, then." He didn't look away from whatever was closing in. "Let's see it."
Bruce let the change take him at the gate the second the first wave hit, and the transformation dropped him into the fight already swinging.
The first drone came in high and he caught it out of the air with both hands, crushed it flat, and used the momentum to backhand the two behind it into the gate's steel frame hard enough to cave it inward. For a few minutes it actually felt like it might go his way. He tore through the line, one fist through a chassis here, a drone thrown clear across the yard there, and there was a stretch, brief and stupid and real, where some small part of him believed this one might turn out different.
A drone got in low under his guard and drove something into his thigh that sparked hot enough to make him roar. He grabbed it by the head and threw it into the ground so hard the concrete cratered under the impact.
Then the second wave came in behind the first without a gap between them, and the third behind that, patient, evenly spaced. He kept swinging, kept connecting, kept flattening whatever came into reach, but somewhere around the fourth wave he understood this wasn't a fight he was losing so much as a resource being spent down on purpose. Every drone he crushed cost him something the next wave was built to take advantage of, a half-second slower, an opening a fraction wider than the one before.
He held on anyway. He put both fists through the ground and sent a shockwave out that took a dozen drones off their feet at once, and for a moment the yard around him was nothing but wreckage and quiet. Holding on was the only thing he had left to offer, and some stubborn piece of him still believed strength like his was supposed to count for something against numbers like these.
It didn't. A new wave came in from three sides at once, faster than anything before it, and he was already swinging when he felt the change start to slip, his own rage running thin under the weight of how long he'd been holding this shape. Somewhere in the half second where he was caught between one form and the next, something found that exact gap and hit him there, precise, like it had been waiting the whole fight for him to open it.
He went down mid-shift, caught between forms, muscle mass draining out of him even as he hit the ground, and even through the haze of it some cold, quiet part of him understood that whoever had done this had known that window was coming before he did.
Tony read the formation before it finished forming, and that alone told him this fight was going to go different from whatever was happening to the rest of his team right now, wherever they were.
"F.R.I.D.A.Y., give me the choke points on this block."
"Marked. Three exits, two collapsed."
"Then we funnel them through the third."
He came in hot and low, repulsors thinning the first wave before it fully cleared cover, and adjusted mid-flight when the second wave tried the same trick Ultron's forces had been running all night. It didn't work twice on him. He'd built half this city's defense grid; he knew every blind corner it had, and he used every one of them.
"You're slower than the last batch," he said, mostly to himself, mostly to keep his head where it needed to be. "Somebody's cutting corners on the upgrade cycle."
The drones didn't answer. They rarely did. He put the last of them down in a controlled burn that left the block quiet in a way that felt, for the first time all night, like something he'd actually earned.
He let himself have exactly one breath before the voice cut in.
"Efficient," it said, calm, unhurried, coming from everywhere and nowhere the way it always did. "You've always been the one who adapts fastest. It's why I saved you for last."
Tony's HUD flagged nothing. No signal source, no origin point, which meant Ultron wasn't broadcasting from somewhere out here. He was already inside something Tony cared about.
"Where are you."
"Closer than you'd like."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you need right now." A pause, deliberate, the kind Ultron never actually needed to take. "I've had time to catalogue everything inside your Tower tonight. Every system. Every asset. Human, and otherwise."
Tony's stomach dropped before his brain finished the sentence.
"You touch him, I will take you apart piece by piece and use the pieces to build something that actually works."
"You misunderstand. I haven't touched anything yet."
That single word did more damage than the whole fight had. Yet.
Tony didn't answer. There wasn't a version of this conversation worth having from here, not with the clock he could suddenly feel running behind every word Ultron said. He was already moving, thrusters at full burn, cutting the fastest line back toward the Tower his suit could manage, the city blurring past below him in a way that usually felt like control and tonight just felt like not enough speed.
"Talk to me, F.R.I.D.A.Y. Sitrep on the Tower, now."
"Working on it, Tony. Internal comms are spotty. I'm not getting a clean read."
"Get me a dirty one, then."
He pushed harder, the suit's frame groaning under the strain of asking it for more than it wanted to give, and somewhere in the part of his mind that never fully shut off even now, he ran the numbers on how long it had actually been since he'd last checked on Larvitar in person.
Longer than he wanted it to be. Long enough that Ultron's word kept looping instead of fading.
Yet.
The Tower came into view ahead of him, lights still on, still standing, nothing about its silhouette wrong at first glance. Then he got close enough to actually look instead of just check, and something about the upper floors made his stomach drop a second time, faster and colder than the first.
He didn't slow down to figure out what it was. He just flew harder.
***
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