Chapter 105: Astartes Prototype vs Red Goblin: Norman Osborn
Zone 23.
After listening to Ivan Vanko's full breakdown of the power armor's systems, Matthew gave him a satisfied pat on the shoulder.
Ivan Vanko's performance in the original Iron Man 2 had not been particularly remarkable. This time, he had delivered something genuinely surprising.
"Can the armor be put through a wearing test right now?"
"Of course." Ivan Vanko nodded without hesitation.
"Good."
Matthew clapped once.
A moment later, a tall male figure pushed through the factory door. Black leather overcoat. Cowboy hat. Each step landed with a sound like compressed iron hitting concrete. His expression was completely empty, like something that had learned to inhabit a face without ever learning what to do with one. The musculature was extraordinary. His arms were thicker than most people's torsos.
Ivan Vanko's expression, watching this figure cross the factory floor, was the same expression Tony Stark had made the first time he saw Nemesis. The same precise combination of wonder and disbelief that something this built could exist in human shape.
"This armor was made for him?"
He thought about it for a moment, searching for the right word.
"That's... a perfect fit."
The Astartes Prototype came to a stop in front of Ivan Vanko. Light-brown eyes looked down at him without any particular warmth. "Ivan Vanko. How do I put this armor on?"
"Simple." Ivan pointed to a platform painted white on the factory floor. "Just step up there."
The Astartes stepped onto the platform and stood still.
Dozens of large mechanical arms descended from above and around, working in a sequence that took the power armor entirely apart and then, with the same deliberate order, assembled it piece by piece around its new occupant.
The disassembly and assembly took roughly an hour.
Men and powered armor had a particular relationship, and Matthew was not immune to it. He watched the entire process without looking away.
When the armor's eye slots lit up with a faint yellow activation glow, everyone in the room came back from wherever they had been.
The Astartes twisted a joint. The electromuscle bundles tightened with an audible response. Inside the armor, a holographic display lit up, and the Astartes raised one gauntleted hand and looked at it.
He threw a test punch at nothing.
CRACK. The sound of splitting air went through the entire factory.
"How does it feel?" Osborn was already forward, eager to hear from the person on the inside.
"Feel..."
The Astartes considered this for several seconds.
"I don't know."
Osborn blinked.
Ivan Vanko was not surprised. His entire design philosophy was that the wearer should feel roughly the same as someone putting on a shirt. A shirt didn't have any notable external sensation. It was just there, doing its job.
"If you can't describe the feeling, let's just test it." Ivan Vanko offered.
"Yes! Testing!" Osborn supported this immediately.
Matthew agreed. They moved to an open expanse of sandy ground nearby.
In the middle of the sand: a main battle tank. Beside it, a heavy dynamic compaction hammer, the type used in major construction projects like airports and port facilities, for deep foundation work. The side of the hammer had "60T" painted on it in white letters.
The compaction hammer was raised into position.
On Osborn's direction, the Astartes walked under it and stood still.
Then, in front of everyone watching:
The hammer dropped.
BOOM.
These hammers were built for exactly this kind of application: the impact force when one of them came down, even partially absorbed by loose sand, was not less than five hundred tons.
The Astartes's body went into the sand with the hammer on top of him.
Ivan Vanko's eyebrow was twitching.
"Osborn. You're sure he's fine."
"He's fine." Osborn waved a hand. His confidence in the armor's material was not affected.
As expected.
The Astartes pushed himself upright from under the weight. The display inside the armor was already running status reports.
Knee joint electromuscle damage excessive. Activating symbiote.
Exterior armor damage: 10%.
Assessment: No major issue.
Reading the assessment, feeling the weight still pressing on him, the Astartes put his full effort into the push. The electromuscle bundles and his own strength combined.
It took about a second. The compaction hammer went up and then over, landing somewhere in the sand well away from where it had started.
Ivan Vanko let out a long breath.
"Status report." A voice from the side of the test area.
"Exterior armor damage ten percent. Knee joint muscle bundles torn." The Astartes climbed out of the impact crater. "No significant operational impact. Symbiote is supplementing the damaged muscle bundles and attempting repair."
"Good. Next test."
"Modern warfare engagement."
Osborn walked to the tank and lowered himself inside. The barrel rotated toward the Astartes.
He had thought briefly about testing with rifles and skipped it. Anyone familiar with sub-Adamantium alloy understood that even anti-material rifles were a waste of time. He went straight to tank rounds.
On Matthew's command, the Astartes stood in place and did not move.
A tank round discharged. The armor-piercing shell crossed the distance in an instant and connected.
The Astartes stepped back two steps. A small dent appeared in the chest plate.
Second round.
Third.
Fourth.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
This time the Astartes did not step back. He walked directly into the barrage.
Several eyeblinks, several hundred meters covered. One hand pressed flat against the tank's hull. The other forced into the gap between turret and body. Both arms applied force simultaneously.
Shriek of metal.
The turret came off and went to the side.
Osborn was inside what remained.
The test observers looked at the chest plate after the barrage. The dents were more pronounced. The armor had not come close to being destroyed.
Ivan Vanko celebrated this internally with some intensity.
Incredible defensive performance. Even measured against Tony Stark's current Iron Man suit, this came out ahead. The advantage was material brute force rather than technical superiority, but ahead nonetheless.
"Battle damage report."
The Astartes glanced at the display. "Armor damage fourteen percent. Power remaining ninety-nine percent."
"Begin testing other functions."
"Yes." The Astartes's voice was unchanged.
Matthew looked at Osborn climbing out of the dismantled tank. "Your turn."
"Happy to," Osborn said. "I want to know the limits of this thing anyway."
He pulled on the red suit. Called out the Goblin Glider. As Carnage merged into the suit, the entire quality of his presence shifted. Something bloodthirsty and immediate rose off him.
Wild laughter. He stepped onto the Glider and shot upward. In seconds he was fifty meters above the sand.
The Glider carried internal blades, twelve mini air-to-ground missiles, and a five-thousand-round micro machine gun. It also had illumination and a flamethrower capability, and could self-destruct if required. This was a significant part of why he found it so satisfying to use. Excellent flight performance, low production cost, built-in offensive loadout.
No preliminary moves.
The moment he was airborne, he fired a string of air-to-ground missiles at the Astartes.
Three impacts threw sand in every direction.
Through the settling cloud, four pumpkin bombs came down in a spread formation, each landing to cover a different angle.
The Astartes's response was immediate.
Four hands of motion: he caught all four pumpkin bombs simultaneously and threw them back the way they came. The acceleration was almost sonic. The air registered it.
Countdown began.
Before Osborn could process the change in situation, the Astartes was already out of the smoke cloud and climbing. The boot propulsion system had launched him straight up and across the distance. He reached Osborn's altitude, grabbed him by the head, and held him in place.
The four pumpkin bombs arrived.
They detonated in Osborn's face.
He hit the ground from the sky.
From the edge of the test area, Matthew and Ivan Vanko both reacted visibly.
"He mastered the propulsion system that fast?"
"And the distance calibration was that precise?"
"Not for nothing that the boss brought him in." Ivan said it with genuine admiration. To internalize powered armor controls this quickly was exceptional in any framework.
BOOM. Both figures landed. A shallow crater in the sand. Smoke and grit mixing.
Osborn was flat on his back in the broken surface. The Red Goblin suit's dark-red material was moving against itself, Carnage's instinctive response to the impact. It moved along his spine and converted the pain signal into something adjacent to excitement.
"Ha." He smiled from behind the mask, and Carnage shaped the expression into something fanged and wider than a human face typically allowed.
The Astartes did not give him time to settle. A machine built for war did not take breaks between engagements, even in a controlled test. One massive armored leg came up and stamped down toward Osborn's face with enough force to flip a tank.
Osborn did not take it straight. With Carnage's help, he moved like something without a rigid skeleton, moving at physically impossible angles, out from under the descending foot without appearing to use normal locomotion.
The stamp hit the sand and produced a two-meter-wide crater. Grit sprayed against the mask.
Osborn slid several meters across the ground and stood slowly. The Red Goblin suit's surface rippled in waves. The dark-red material worked the embedded sand particles out one by one as it settled.
"That's got some force to it." His voice through the mask carried a compressed, reshaped version of amusement. "My masterpiece, fair enough."
He shook his right arm.
In what looked like a casual, loose motion, the forearm's symbiote extended, locked, and hardened. A dark-red whip-blade about two meters long shot out from the wrist, its edge carrying serrated reverse barbs that caught the sunlight with a wet, cold gleam.
Not metal.
More lethal than metal.
The blade struck at a speed that barely left an afterimage.
The Astartes caught it.
One hand closed around the blade mid-swing. He pulled.
Osborn had no angle to brace from. The force was unreasonable and immediate. He left the ground like a fish hauled out of water and flew toward the Astartes.
The Astartes stepped forward. Force loaded through the sole of the boot, up the shin, through the waist and back and shoulder, and into the right arm. The entire electromuscle bundle system in the armor went taut simultaneously, producing a single low hum.
One punch.
No variations. No technique beyond the most fundamental straight strike.
But the force behind it, with the armor behind it, was something the air registered as a short deep boom.
From where Matthew was watching, Osborn appeared to still be mid-flight when the direction reversed.
He rolled across several hundred meters of sand before stopping.
Osborn cursed quietly from the ground.
Osborn had not expected this reaction speed. He had not expected the counter to come that fast.
He looked at Carnage frantically repairing the dent in his chest. He was genuinely glad it was there.
"Terrifying power." He said it to himself.
He was about to stop holding back when Matthew called a halt.
He had seen enough. The picture was complete.
Speed, power, defense: every metric had gone up by more than one tier with the armor on. The armored Astartes Prototype, in raw numbers, sat only slightly below the Pursuer in its current fully-upgraded configuration. With further armor improvements in the pipeline, the gap would close further.