Tony Stark was playing a high stakes game of chess and he wasn't about to let himself be the captured king. He knew the inherent risks of his new abilities. If he revealed his Magnetism or High Speed Regeneration during a simple home invasion, he wouldn't just be a billionaire anymore… he'd be a specimen for every government lab on the planet.
To prevent this, Tony transformed Stark Tower into his fortress. He spent his nights in the sprawling penthouse, surrounded by corporate security and the prying eyes of the public, which acted as his most effective shield. He had already scrubbed his Malibu home of anything truly vital. Every byte of data, every blueprint of the Mark III and every piece of Tarot Club intelligence was moved to an "air gapped" server deep within the tower's core, a digital island with no physical connection to the outside world.
Using the precision of his magnetic control and the genius of his engineering, he had engineered the Mark V "Suitcase" Armor. It was a marvel of portability and rapid deployment, a lightweight lattice of high tensile alloys that sat discreetly in a custom built case in his office. He was never more than a few feet away from becoming Iron Man, but to the world, he just looked like a busy CEO trying to save his company from a hostile government.
In his Malibu workshop, Tony left a carefully prepared "ghost" of his life. He left the lights on, a few old cars in the garage and the Trojan Horse Arc Reactor. He placed it in a reinforced glass casing on his primary workbench, right where Obadiah's obsolete security codes would lead him.
"JARVIS, keep the Malibu feeds encrypted but live," Tony instructed while sitting in his Stark Tower office, sipping a coffee. "I want to see the moment our guest arrives."
Three days later, while Tony was in a high profile meeting with the board of directors, a silent alert pulsed on his phone. His private "Shadow Team" bodyguards, invisibly integrated into the building's security, signaled that the Malibu perimeter had been breached.
Tony let the "theft" happen. He waited for the official reports to come in that a military grade strike team had bypassed his residential security and made off with the reactor.
An hour later, Tony arrived at his Malibu estate, flanked by his head of security, Happy Hogan and his elite mercenary team. The house was a calculated mess… glass was shattered and the workshop door had been burned through with a thermal lance, a clear sign of a military style operation.
Happy was checking the rooms, his face pale. "Tony, they took it. The energy source... it's gone. We need to call the police, the FBI and everyone!"
Tony walked slowly into the workshop. He looked at the shattered pedestal where the booby trapped reactor had been sitting. His Eye Boy vision picked up the lingering heat signatures of the tactical boots and the residue of the military grade explosives used on the door. It was a perfect forensic trail leading straight back to the Pentagon's black site bunkers.
"Don't worry about the police, Happy," Tony said, his voice deceptively calm. "Obie has no idea he just signed his own death warrant… and a massive settlement check for Stark Industries."
————
The frustration boiling inside Obadiah Stane had reached a fever pitch. For days, he had watched the surveillance feeds of Stark Tower, hoping Tony would step out into the open so he could eliminate him quietly. But Tony remained like a "turtle in a shell," buried under layers of corporate security and public scrutiny.
Finally, Stane's patience snapped. "Forget the man for now," he barked at the rogue General overseeing the Iron Monger project. "Get me the heart. Without the power source, the man is just a billionaire in a suit. With it, I am a god."
The raid on the Malibu house was violent. As Stane stood in the secret underground military base hours later, he held the miniaturized Arc Reactor in his hand like a glowing soul. He didn't notice the microscopic "insect" cameras… that had clung to his collar and the walls of the bunker, broadcasting everything back to Tony's private servers.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Stane whispered, looking at the assembled scientists and Pentagon officials gathered in the massive hangar.
In the center of the room stood the Iron Monger. It was a twelve foot tall mountain of depleted uranium and jagged steel, a monument to brute force. Stane climbed into the open cockpit, the metal groaning under his weight.
"Initiate the power sequence," Stane commanded, his voice booming over the hangar's intercom. "I want every system to be green. We're going to show the Pentagon what real peace looks like."
The lead scientist, trembling with a mixture of fear and excitement, carefully slotted Tony's "Trojan Horse" reactor into the chest cavity of the Monger.
Immediately, the hangar was filled with a high pitched hum. The massive suit's optical sensors flickered to life with an unstable blue light.
Stane laughed, a guttural sound, as the haptic feedback systems surged into his arms. "The parameters are perfect! Targeting slaved to the GPS network! Hydraulics at one hundred percent! I can feel the power!"
The military brass clapped each other on the back, grinning at the display of stolen might. For ten minutes, Stane moved the massive machine around the hangar, crushing concrete blocks with its fists and testing the 20mm Gatling systems, shredding steel targets into confetti. He felt invincible. He felt like the new king of the world.
But Tony's thirty minute timer was relentless.
Inside the reactor, the microscopic thermite pulse bomb reached its "zero" state. The magnetic containment field… the very thing holding the Arc energy in a stable fusion reaction… suddenly inverted.
"Sir! We have a thermal spike in the core!" the lead scientist screamed, his eyes glued to the monitors as red alerts flooded the screen. "The energy is cascading! It's a… "
He never finished the sentence.
The "Trojan" reactor detonated with the white hot intensity of a localized sun. Because Tony had engineered it to react with the surrounding depleted uranium, the blast was amplified a hundredfold by the Iron Monger's own massive frame.
BOOM.
A blinding white flash consumed the hangar, erasing all shadows. The shockwave was so powerful it turned the reinforced concrete walls into dust. The Pentagon officials, the rogue scientists and the Iron Monger itself were caught in the epicenter of an azure colored explosion that looked like a tactical nuke had been detonated underground.
The entire secret base buckled. The ceiling collapsed, burying the corruption, the stolen tech and Obadiah Stane's monumental ego under a million tons of earth and fire.
In the quiet of his Stark Tower office, Tony watched the live feed from the insect drones turn to static as the cameras were instantly vaporized.
He looked at the sunrise over the New York skyline.
"The evidence is uploaded, JARVIS?"
"Yes, Sir. The full footage of the military sponsored raid on your home, the illegal black site base and the catastrophic explosion has been sent to every major news outlet and the International Court of Justice in The Hague."
Tony leaned back in his chair, his eyes glowing with a cold light. "The military wanted a weapon. They got one. Now, it's time to send them the bill."