"Why did you kill him?!"
Tony's voice cracked with rage as he stared at Dennis Carradine's lifeless body. The armor's sensors were already confirming what his eyes couldn't deny—the man was dead, his heart pierced with surgical precision.
Ever since donning the Iron Man armor, Tony had made it his mission to protect the innocent. He'd saved dozens of lives, pulled people from burning buildings, stopped terrorist attacks. Each rescue had reinforced a lesson he'd learned in that Afghan cave: life was precious, and worth fighting for.
But this creature—this thing—had just committed cold-blooded murder right in front of him.
"How dare you!" Tony repeated, his voice distorting through the armor's speakers as fury overwhelmed his usual composure.
In his mind's eye, Ben's alien features seemed to blur and shift, replaced by the faces of the Ten Rings terrorists who had tortured him, who had forced him to build weapons while innocent people died around them.
"Why wouldn't I dare?" Ben asked with chilling casualness.
The question hit Tony like a slap. He'd expected rage, defiance, maybe even remorse—not this matter-of-fact attitude toward murder.
"Do you honestly think he was a good person?" Ben continued, his tone carrying a bitter edge of amusement.
If Dennis Carradine had been an upstanding citizen, Ben wouldn't have found his name scattered throughout NYPD arrest records. The man had been a career criminal—robbery, assault, gang affiliations stretching back years. His rap sheet read like a textbook example of urban decay, and that was just the crimes he'd been caught committing.
But even if Dennis had been a saint, Ben's decision wouldn't have changed. Family came first, always. His adopted Dad and Mom had given him everything when he'd had nothing. They'd opened their home, their hearts, their lives to a child who'd lost everything.
Ben knew his actions were far from just. He knew that Dad and Mom would be horrified if they ever learned what he'd done tonight. But he'd rather carry their disapproval than attend their funerals.
As long as his family was safe, he'd paint his hands red without hesitation.
"And you, Tony Stark?" Ben's voice carried a cutting edge that made Tony's blood run cold. "How much better are you than me?"
"What?" Tony's response was barely a whisper.
"Have you taken fewer lives than I have?"
The question hung in the air like a blade pressed against Tony's throat. Every instinct screamed at him to deflect, to deny, to rage against the accusation—but the words wouldn't come.
"I killed terrorists!" Tony finally managed, the words tasting like ash in his mouth.
"You know that's not what I mean." Ben shook his head with something approaching pity. "Stark Industries' current prosperity—how much of it was built on arms sales? Or do you think it only counts as murder when you pull the trigger yourself?"
Silence stretched between them, broken only by the distant hum of the armor's systems. Tony felt as though the factory floor had opened beneath him, sending him tumbling into an abyss he'd spent months trying to forget.
The weapons division. The contracts with defense departments around the world. The missiles, the guns, the bombs—all bearing the Stark name, all designed for one purpose.
"I never intended for weapons to reach terrorists," Tony said, his voice barely audible. "I didn't know about Obadiah's—"
"Didn't know, or didn't care?" Ben interrupted ruthlessly.
The accusation cut deeper than any physical blow could have. Tony had to admit, if only to himself, that the future Iron Man was indeed a hero worthy of admiration. Before his capture and transformation, though? He'd been everything Ben was suggesting and worse.
The excuse that Obadiah had handled the company's day-to-day operations was paper-thin and they both knew it. Even if Obadiah hadn't been selling weapons to both sides of every conflict, Stark Industries had been working directly with governments whose moral compass pointed toward profit rather than justice.
How many innocent people had died because of weapons bearing the Stark name? How many children had been orphaned by missiles he'd designed? How many families had been destroyed by conflicts fueled by his technology?
"When you designed those weapons," Ben pressed, his voice relentless, "didn't you consider that they'd be used to invade sovereign nations? To kill innocent children who'd never threatened anyone?"
Tony's throat felt like it was closing.
"It's not that you didn't know," Ben continued with surgical precision. "You just didn't care."
The words hit their target with devastating accuracy. What else were weapons designed for, if not killing? Tony had always known exactly what kind of country America was—spreading its influence across the globe under the banner of world police, instigating conflicts wherever its interests were threatened.
He'd known, and he'd profited from it.
The scale of each war directly correlated to Stark Industries' quarterly profits. The more people died, the more money flowed into his accounts, funding his lifestyle of champagne and casual relationships while families mourned their dead thousands of miles away.
Every dollar he'd earned had been paid for in blood.
"So I shut down the weapons division," Tony said finally, his voice hollow.
But closing the factory wasn't atonement—it was just a promise not to repeat past mistakes. A school bully who stopped throwing punches hadn't suddenly become a good person; he'd simply stopped being actively evil.
Why should the dead forgive him just because he'd laid down his tools of destruction?
Tony couldn't refute Ben's accusations because, fundamentally, they were true. It had taken a missile explosion and three months of captivity for him to truly understand the weight of his creations. No amount of heroic action could resurrect the victims of conflicts he'd enabled.
The living had no right to grant forgiveness on behalf of the dead.
Tony carried that guilt like a stone in his chest, driving him to push harder, fight longer, sacrifice more in his endless quest for redemption. It was why Captain America's accusation of selfishness had cut so deep, and why he'd ultimately chosen to make the ultimate sacrifice when the time came.
But guilt was a private burden. Having it dissected by a stranger—especially a murderous alien—was another matter entirely.
"I'll say this one more time," Tony said, his voice hardening with resolve. "Surrender now, or I'll make you surrender."
Ben wasn't surprised to see Tony emerge from his moment of self-reflection. Someone as fundamentally self-centered as Tony Stark wouldn't be broken by a few uncomfortable truths.
Without warning, Ben raised his hand—palm open, fingers spread wide.
"I'll finish you in three minutes," he said with calm certainty.
Then he moved.
Even at the peak of human reflexes, Tony's enhanced nervous system couldn't track Ben's acceleration. One moment the alien was standing ten feet away; the next, he was airborne, his clawed foot driving toward the arc reactor in Tony's chest.
The impact sent shockwaves through the armor's systems, but Ben wasn't finished. Using Tony's armored torso as a springboard, he twisted with impossible grace, his powerful tail whipping around like a biological sledgehammer to crack against Tony's helmet.
CLANG!
The sound of alien flesh meeting advanced metal echoed through the factory as Tony rocketed backward, his armored form punching through the brick wall in an explosion of dust and debris.
XLR8 might not possess the raw destructive power of some alien forms, but speed was its own kind of weapon. When something the size of a velociraptor moving at several hundred kilometers per hour struck with focused intent, the results were devastating.
If Tony hadn't been wearing the armor, the tail strike alone would have split his skull like a melon.
Even protected by advanced technology, Tony's head rang like a bell, his vision swimming as his brain tried to process the trauma.
"Sir," Jarvis's calm voice cut through the confusion, "you appear to have sustained a mild concussion."
Tony ignored the diagnosis, fury burning away the disorientation.
"You asked for it!" he snarled, his repulsors flaring to maximum power.
The Mark III's propulsion systems roared to life, catapulting him back through the hole he'd created. His palm cannons were already charging before he cleared the debris.
BOOM!
But Ben had been expecting retaliation.
"You're too slow, Tony," Ben taunted, his form a blur of motion that made the energy beams look like they were moving through molasses.
To someone capable of moving faster than most humans could think, Tony's attack might as well have been telegraphed a week in advance.
"Congratulations, sir," Jarvis observed with what sounded suspiciously like satisfaction. "Someone has finally called you slow."