AN: Thanks to Sargerogue for reviewing last chapter. Don't worry, your question will be answered soon, if it wasn't already! (How's that for ambiguous?)
Thor swung Mjölnir at an upward angle into the chest of the drone standing in front of him, throwing it up into the air. Behind him, Ms. Marvel shot a blast of blue energy from her right hand, which connected with the ARC reactor set in the drone's chest and threw the drone backwards. Next to him, Hulk picked up a drone in each hand and smashed them together. He threw first one and then the other into the crowd of drones approaching them.
As the drones fired their energy weapons at them, Ms. Marvel advanced to interpose herself between the drones and her teammates and absorb the energy before it reached them. As she absorbed more and more energy, her body began to glow and radiate heat. Her eyes turned an electric blue and her hair stood on end due to the energy coursing through her. When the drones cut off their energy beams, the other two Avengers could barely stand to look at her for the light emitting from her body. She took a step back toward Thor and placed her left palm on Mjölnir, transferring some of the energy over to the hammer.
Thor felt Mjölnir vibrating in his hand. He nodded to Ms. Marvel, who lifted her hands. Thor willed the energy contained in his hammer to shoot out in a web, starting from the hammer's head and running through all the nearby drones. The electrical current jumped from drone to drone until it had spent all of its energy. As one, forty drones collapsed limply to the floor.
While he was doing that, Ms. Marvel shot the energy she had retained out of her hands. She spread her fingers and allowed each one to channel a beam of energy. Ms. Marvel swung her hands around, using the energy beams as a scythe to cut through the drones standing nearby. Hulk charged in, heedless of the energy beams streaking around him. As they hit his body, they dispersed in all directions. He grabbed the severed torso of a drone standing to his right before it could fall to the ground, crushed it into a ball between his fists, and threw it like a baseball at a column of drones standing in front of him.
A pair of yellow energy pulses shot out of a point a foot above the drones. The spot wavered and shook a bit as though it could not hold steady, and the two energy pulses flickered out. They returned a moment later, stronger this time, and a pair of drones exploded an instant after the energy pulses struck them.
Scott Lang reappeared at that spot as he deactivated his Pym Particle generator. He dropped down onto a drone, reached into its neck cavity, and pulled out a pair of wires with his right hand. Simultaneously, he held out his left hand and shot a pulse of yellow energy at another drone. The drone shattered.
"So, Bill, what have you got for me?" Scott asked, walking into the biochemist's lab less than fifteen minutes after waking up from his medically-induced coma.
"Scott!" Bill grinned, pulling the other man into a bear hug. "I was worried Wanda would not be able to revive you; she said there was a 34% chance of it going horribly wrong and turning you into a giant mutant cockroach!"
"Metamorphosis, right?" Scott replied without thinking. He stopped and stared at Bill and Wanda slack-jawed as his mind processed what he had just heard. "Wait… what?"
"You weren't going to turn into a cockroach," Wanda said, brushing the comment off with a dismissive wave. "Though you could have been sucked into an alternate reality where cockroaches are the only survivors of a nuclear holocaust."
"That would have been fun; I could've been 'Cockroach-Man'," Scott commented. "So, back to this new suit I was promised. How did you convince the Professor to let me use something new?"
"I simply told him what had happened," Bill responded. "He said he was upset that his gift which you had stolen had nearly gotten you killed and left your daughter without a father. I convinced him I could make something a little more protective for you if I wasn't being constrained by 50-year-old fashions."
Bill led Scott over to his worktable, on which he had laid out all the pieces of the new Ant-Man suit. "I made your suit out of fire-resistant material this time, so hopefully you won't get incinerated again—"
"Thanks for reminding me," Scott muttered under his breath.
"—and I added a couple of triangular wings that extend out along the arms and torso, as well as one that extends between your legs so you can glide around instead of just falling, since I know how much you like jumping off of ridiculous heights," Bill continued, ignoring the interruption. "The ones on your arms are housed here in the torso, and slide out along this seam in your arms when you activate them. Same thing with the wing between your legs: It folds up to fit in a compartment at the crotch, and fans out down your inseams. Your Pym Particle generator is still attached to the belt, but it should be easier to control, since I built the control mechanism into your gloves. Simply move the fingers on your right hand in the correct combination to grow or shrink."
"Thanks. It was always really difficult to control my size on the other suit, especially when I was in the middle of a fight," Scott observed, picking up the right glove off the table. "It feels heavy," he commented, surprised.
"Part of that is the control mechanism, but part is also from your new Bio-Stingers," Bill explained. "Remember the energy pulses the Professor created for his Yellowjacket persona? I convinced him to let me have the schematics to incorporate them into your new suit. Press your thumb to your index finger and hold your wrist like this," he demonstrated, "and the Bio-Stinger will tap into your own bio-energy and fire an energy pulse out of the focusing pad in the palm."
"Sweet," Scott said appreciatively, pulling the glove onto his right hand. He reached out and ran his other hand over the helmet sitting on the table, which looked like a motorcycle crash helmet. He asked, "Is this what I think it is?"
"That's your new helmet," Bill nodded. "It even has a heads-up display similar to War Machine's or Iron Man's, though I did not design it to use the same operating system. It will show you your location and size, as well as the locations of your teammates and any nearby insects. With this helmet you don't need to wear a communicator, since it is built in, unlike the old one. You don't need antennae with this one since the entire helmet generates and focuses the signals you need to communicate with insects."
"Plus, it looks a lot cooler than the old one," Scott observed, pulling the helmet on over his head. "I always felt like something out of one of the Alien movies in that thing. Did I tell you that I actually scared a kid after the Chitauri invasion? I was trying to rescue him and he freaked out when he saw the helmet! How many superheroes can say, 'My superpower is the ability to frighten small children'?"
Ant-Man jumped off the drone's back, contorting himself and shrinking as he did so to avoid an energy beam. As he spun around, he fired his Bio-Stinger at the offending drone, melting its energy cannons and pushing it backward to the ground. Scott landed on the Hulk's outstretched arm and ran up it onto the beast's shoulder. He fired a Bio-Stinger at a drone standing behind Hulk just as it was about to fire, and jumped off as the Hulk swung around to grab that drone in his right hand.
Scott threw out his arms and spread his legs to deploy his wings, and glided toward the ground, picking up speed as he did so. He leaned back slightly to pick up altitude and flew straight up a drone's torso. As he lost momentum, he reached for a handhold on the drone's chest, and slid in through a crack in its chest plate. Scott crawled through the systems to the command center located inside the chest cavity, where he pulled a tiny flash drive out of his utility belt, expanded it to normal size, and maneuvered it into a USB slot. As soon as all the drone's data had downloaded, he pulled the flash drive out, shrunk it back, and returned it to its pouch on his belt. Scott reached into the pouch next to the flash drive and pulled out a tiny C4 charge, which he stuck to the processor.
Once the charge was set, Scott climbed back out of the drone the way he'd come. When he reached the outside, he summoned a cockroach to himself, jumped from the drone, and pressed the detonator in his hand. The drone exploded behind him as he fell and landed on the cockroach's back. Around him, a horde of cockroaches milled about, awaiting his command. With a glance to either side, Ant-Man ordered them to charge.
Thor was shocked to see a patch of the ground turn black-and-brown as cockroaches gathered near Ant-Man. As the cockroaches formed into columns and raced across the ground toward the final group of drones, Thor threw Mjölnir above them. Simultaneously, Ant-Man leapt from the back of his cockroach steed, returned partway to normal size, fired a Bio-Stinger at one of the drones, and returned to ant size as he caught hold of the flying hammer.
Scott jumped off Mjölnir the instant before it flew through a drone's chest. Scott fired a Bio-Stinger to his left as he landed on the drone in front of him. His heads-up display indicated a pair of wires near the surface close to his location. He reached in through a tiny opening in the armor, grabbed the wires, and pulled. As soon as his hand was out, he returned to normal size and jumped off the drone. To his right, the army of cockroaches he had summoned swarmed up the legs of another drone, gnawing on any wires they could reach. Behind him, Scott heard an explosion as Ms. Marvel absorbed an energy blast and reflected it back at the final drone.
Ant-Man, Thor, Ms. Marvel, and Hulk surveyed the destruction surrounding them. The walls were pockmarked with scorch marks and tiny holes from flying debris. Wrecked drone parts littered the floor around their feet. Crushed insects were scattered around where they had gotten in the way of the Avengers' or the drones' feet. Near the far wall of the basement, the four Avengers caught sight of a wooden chair. It had fallen over to one side, and the occupant's head was resting on the floor. The man made no effort to look at them.
Scott and Carol nodded to Thor and Hulk before turning to walk back into the factory basement. As they reached the hole separating the two basements, Clint Barton's head poked through. A bruise was starting to form on his cheek, and a trickle of blood was flowing out of a fresh cut in his forehead, but he was otherwise unharmed. "We've found most of the others, though Mockingbird and one of the Asgardians are both still missing," he said.
Scott pushed his feelings to the side and calmly summoned all the ants in the area to search for the final two missing heroes. He and Carol stepped through the opening into the factory basement and found Captain America and Iron Fist leaning against the wall next to a man wearing a metal breastplate with his black hair tied back in a bun.
"Hogun agreed to patch everyone up," Clint explained as they walked over to that group. Captain America seemed slightly dazed, though he was trying his best to take command of the situation. Iron Fist looked like he had taken the most damage from the storm of rubble: His shirt was torn in several places, and the edges were caked with dried blood. He had bruises running the length of his arms, and a shining welt on his left cheek. However, the bruises had already turned the sickly yellow color of old bruises as they healed rapidly, and none of the others were quite as badly injured as he was.
On the way, they passed a blonde Asgardian woman who was working to dig a very angry-looking Power Man out of a pile of brick and factory machinery. Nearby, an older Asgardian man with a long brown beard was doing the same for a slightly-dazed black-haired Asgardian woman.
Off to the side, Vision and War Machine were walking around using their scanners to search for their two missing teammates.
Thor and Hulk bounded across the basement to the chair and reached it at the same moment. The unconscious man tied to it was barely recognizable for his haggard appearance. His normally well-groomed black hair was unkempt, his ordinarily clean cut goatee was untrimmed and mangy, and he had not shaved in days. His jeans were covered in filth and his Metallica shirt was barely recognizable under a layer of bloodstains, food stains, and dirt. The brash confidence normally present in his expression was gone, replaced by a black eye and split lip. Yet even with all that, they recognized their lost teammate in an instant:
"Man of Iron!" Thor exclaimed, as Hulk bellowed, "Metal Man!"
It was Tony.