Chapter 6: He Looks Super Hot

"How dare you kill him!" Tony's voice exploded with raw fury that echoed throughout the abandoned factory, the sound reverberating off the twisted metal and concrete like the roar of some enraged beast.

For months now, he'd been operating as Iron Man, dedicating himself to protecting innocent people and fighting injustice wherever he found it. Every mission, every intervention, every moment he put his life on the line was driven by hard-earned knowledge that human existence was fragile and irreplaceable.

He'd saved countless lives—ordinary people he would never have noticed before his captivity in Afghanistan, but who he now understood were infinitely precious. Each rescue had reinforced his belief that with great power came the responsibility to protect those who couldn't protect themselves.

And this monster had just murdered someone right in front of him, as casually as stepping on an insect.

"How could you?" Tony's voice cracked with emotion, his vision overlaying Bennett's alien features with memories of the terrorists who had nearly killed him in that cave. "He was defenseless! He was begging for his life!"

"Why shouldn't I have?" Bennett replied with chilling matter-of-factness, tilting his head slightly as if genuinely curious about Tony's emotional response.

"You think he was some kind of innocent victim?" Bennett's laugh was devoid of any warmth or humanity, a sound like grinding metal. "You think Dennis Carradine was a good person who deserved to live?"

If Dennis had truly been an innocent man, Bennett wouldn't have found his name in the NYPD's criminal database in the first place. The truth was that Dennis had been a career criminal with an extensive rap sheet—robbery, burglary, assault, drug dealing, extortion. The man had been arrested multiple times for various offenses, and those were just the crimes where he'd actually been caught.

Dennis had been involved in gang warfare, had committed violence against innocent people, and would have continued escalating his criminal behavior until he eventually murdered Uncle Ben during a botched carjacking attempt just a few days from now.

But even if Dennis had been a saint, even if he'd spent his entire life helping orphans and feeding the homeless, Bennett still wouldn't have hesitated to kill him if it meant protecting his family.

When it came to protecting Ben and May Parker, Bennett's moral calculus was brutally simple and utterly uncompromising.

Bennett knew his actions were completely indefensible by any reasonable ethical standard. He knew that Uncle Ben and Aunt May would be horrified if they discovered what he'd done in their names. But he couldn't bear the thought of standing over Uncle Ben's grave, knowing he'd had the power to prevent it and chosen to do nothing.

As long as Ben and May Parker remained safe, Bennett was perfectly willing to stain his hands with blood.

"What about you, Tony Stark?" Bennett asked, his transformed voice carrying harmonics that made the question seem to come from multiple sources simultaneously. "How exactly are you any better than me? How much blood is on your hands?"

"What are you talking about?" Tony demanded, though something in his tone suggested he already knew where this conversation was heading.

"Tell me, how many people have you killed? How many lives has your technology ended?"

"I've only killed terrorists and enemy combatants!" Tony shot back immediately, his voice defensive. "People who were actively trying to hurt innocent civilians!"

"You know that's not what I'm talking about," Bennett replied, shaking his alien head with something resembling pity. "Stark Industries built its entire fortune on weapons manufacturing, didn't it? For decades, your company produced the instruments of death and sold them to the highest bidder. Or do you only count it as murder when you personally pull the trigger?"

Tony fell silent, the weight of Bennett's words hitting him like a physical blow.

Arms dealing had been the greatest mistake of his life, and he'd been working tirelessly to make amends ever since his return from Afghanistan. Shutting down the weapons division, hunting down terrorists who'd acquired Stark technology, using Iron Man to actively fight against the violence his company had enabled—every day was an attempt to balance scales that might never be balanced.

But Bennett was right. No amount of heroism could resurrect the dead.

"I never intended for my weapons to reach terrorist organizations," Tony said quietly, his voice lacking its usual confidence. "I didn't know Obadiah was selling to—"

"Didn't know, or didn't care?" Bennett interrupted with razor-sharp precision. "Because there's a significant difference between ignorance and willful blindness."

Bennett had actually admired Tony Stark in his previous life, enjoyed the Iron Man films, respected the character's eventual growth into a true hero. But he couldn't ignore the uncomfortable truth about who Tony had been before his Damascus moment in that Afghan cave.

Even setting aside Obadiah Stane's betrayal, Stark Industries had been directly contracted with the U.S. military for decades. Tony was intelligent enough to understand exactly how those weapons would be used, where they would end up, whose children would die when they exploded.

"When you were designing missiles and selling them to anyone with enough money, did you ever think about the children who would die when those weapons were deployed?" Bennett pressed relentlessly. "Did you consider the families that would be torn apart, the homes that would be destroyed, the entire communities that would be displaced by the violence your technology enabled?"

"Did you lose sleep thinking about the collateral damage, or were you too busy counting your profits to care?"

Bennett's words cut deep because they were absolutely accurate, dissecting Tony's past with surgical precision.

Weapons had only one purpose—to kill people. Tony had always understood that fundamental truth, just as he'd always been aware of his country's role as a global military interventionist. He'd known about the countless conflicts that American weapons had fueled, the devastating wars that had been fought with Stark technology.

He simply hadn't cared, as long as the victims remained abstract statistics in distant countries.

Those faraway deaths hadn't interfered with his champagne lifestyle or his parade of supermodels. If anything, larger conflicts meant bigger contracts, more weapons sales, more money to fund his extravagant existence. The more people died, the richer he became.

Every dollar in Tony Stark's bank account had been earned through someone else's suffering.

"That's why I shut down the weapons division," Tony said finally, his voice barely above a whisper.

But ending weapons production wasn't the same as atonement. It simply meant he'd stopped actively contributing to future violence—it didn't resurrect anyone who'd already been killed by Stark technology.

It was like a serial killer deciding to stop murdering people. The decision not to cause additional harm didn't automatically transform him into a good person, and it certainly didn't entitle him to forgiveness from the families of his victims.

Why should redemption be easier for perpetrators than justice was for victims?

Tony couldn't argue with Bennett's logic because he knew every word was true. Until that moment in the Afghan desert when he'd nearly died from his own weapons, he'd never truly understood the horror and devastation that his technology enabled.

No matter how many people he saved as Iron Man, the living had no right to forgive him on behalf of the dead.

Tony's guilt and self-recrimination over his past mistakes were genuine—they would eventually drive him to make increasingly desperate attempts to atone for his sins. But being forced to confront those failures by a hostile alien was a different matter entirely.

Regardless of his personal demons, Tony couldn't allow this creature to continue threatening innocent people.

"Last warning," Tony said, his repulsors charging with deadly energy that made the air around them shimmer with heat. "Surrender now, or I'll put you down like the monster you are."

Seeing Tony emerge from his moment of self-doubt, Bennett wasn't surprised. Someone with Tony Stark's ego and determination wouldn't be broken by a few uncomfortable truths about his past, no matter how accurate they might be.

Bennett slowly raised his hands in apparent surrender, the gesture mockingly theatrical.

Then he extended his palm toward Tony with deliberate precision. "Three minutes. That's all I need to finish you, Stark."

The moment those words left his mouth, Bennett exploded into motion, moving so fast that he seemed to simply vanish from his previous position like a magic trick.

He launched himself upward in a perfect arc, driving his wheeled foot directly into the arc reactor at the center of Tony's chest armor with the force of a missile impact. Before Tony could even register the collision, Bennett used the armored torso as a springboard, twisting his body with inhuman flexibility and whipping his powerful tail around like a steel cable to strike Tony's helmet with devastating force.

"CLANG!"

The impact sent Tony rocketing backward through the air like a cannonball, his armored body smashing completely through the factory's concrete wall in an explosion of dust and debris. He tumbled across the street beyond in a shower of sparks, leaving a trail of gouged asphalt and twisted metal before finally coming to rest against a parked car.

While XLR8 didn't possess the raw destructive power of some other alien transformations, speed translated directly into kinetic energy. Having a velociraptor-sized creature impact at several hundred miles per hour was like being hit by a guided missile, and Bennett had deliberately held back to avoid killing Tony outright.

If Tony hadn't been wearing his armor, that tail strike alone would have turned his skull into paste.

Even with the Mark IV's protection, Tony's brain had been rattled severely. His vision was blurred and doubled, his hearing was distorted by persistent ringing that sounded like fire alarms, and his balance was completely shot.

"Sir, you appear to have sustained a mild concussion," JARVIS informed him with characteristic British understatement, medical diagnostics flooding Tony's HUD with concerning data.

Tony ignored his AI's medical assessment, focusing instead on the rage building in his chest like molten metal.

"You asked for it, kid!" he snarled, his fury overriding his physical discomfort and basic tactical sense.

Every thruster in the Mark IV armor ignited simultaneously, propelling Tony back through the hole in the factory wall like a guided missile seeking revenge. His palm repulsors were already charging as he accelerated, preparing to unleash everything the suit had at this alien threat.

"BOOM!"

But Bennett had anticipated exactly this response, reading Tony's personality like an open book.

"Too slow, Tony," Bennett called out mockingly from a completely different position than where Tony's weapons had targeted, his voice carrying amusement that was almost insulting in its casualness.

From the moment Tony had begun raising his arm, the outcome had been inevitable. Human reflexes, even enhanced by advanced technology, simply couldn't compete with XLR8's superhuman velocity and precognitive combat instincts.

"Congratulations, sir," JARVIS said with what actually did sound like amusement this time. "You've finally encountered someone who considers you sluggish."

Tony glared at the space where Bennett had been standing, his jaw clenched in frustration and growing rage that threatened to override his tactical judgment entirely.

The worst part wasn't that he was being outmaneuvered—it was that this alien monster was making it look effortless.