Stark grunted as Alex Mercer tackled him with enough force to rival a charging freight train. The two of them struck against the pavement and kept going, dragged by the remaining momentum they carved a pipe shaped valley through the street and disturbed enough dust and debris to smother the boulevard in a thick, brown fog.
Stark reacted on his impulses. When Alex Mercer straddled him and raised a fist to strike he was met with a high-powered repulsor blast to the chest, point-blank, at an angle that sent him flying over Stark's head to crumple the ruins of an abandoned vehicle fused to the sidewalk in some previous explosion.
The Iron Man wasted no time getting to his feet and rose to a surveyable height, Alex Mercer showing up through the smoke as a small thermal blob through a cloud of dark-blueness.
The Avenger casually lifted an arm and loosed a single concussive missile that weaved a meandering trail through the smoke and sent mercer tumbling away in a strident bark of force and sound.
Convinced his enemy would be indisposed long enough to check, a particularly loud outcry caught Stark's attention and he turned to hover at a slight lean.
The previous crowd had almost completely dispersed now, most of them shouting and crying out terrified as blind panic sent them in all directions, scrambling and potentially trampling over each other; it was hard to tell clearly if anyone was hurt in thermal, especially while also trying to keep an eye on Mercer. The crowd had fused into a white mass
As an Avenger with team-mates closing in fast however Stark made his decision quickly and was about ready to try and calm the frantic crowd before he was suddenly seized around the waist and sent to the ground with a forceful thud that shuddered the foundations of the surrounding block and punched an Iron Man sized crater into the desiccated asphalt.
He cursed at the new pressure in his hip as the thick, black tendril, contracting inflexibly around his waist, raised him up about half a story and smacked him down twice more into the same exacerbated crater before he could try to burn it away.
Iron Man's suit let out a subtle noise as suddenly Alex's limb went taught and Stark almost cried out at the sudden flex in his back as he was snapped out of his hold and thrown by his opponent towards his opponent.
Stark was granted only a nanosecond's showing of Alex mercer's free arm shifting and bulging into a black, boulder-sized cudgel that tore through the air and smashed into his armour with a bellowing strike loud enough to damage the naked human ear before he was cast across the street into one of the old houses, which posthumously collapsed on him.
The building's destruction was nothing to worry about: Iron Man's armour had survived nigh on implausible amounts of force plenty of times before; flimsy wood and asbestos-ridden plaster was hardly even nuisance to him.
The rubble that he was buried under was pushed off almost nonchalantly and Mercer was greeted with a quite unscathed Iron Man strolling pleasantly out of the ruins, brushing a stain of dust off his crimson shoulder.
'Y'know…' he began, the smile on his lips audible in his voice 'if this is what you constitute as killing someone quickly I shudder to think what happens when you decide to take your time'
Alex said nothing but his glare could be aptly described as murderous. He hunched into a crouch that he soon had to dive out of when Iron Man took brief aim and fired off a series of lowly charged palm lasers at him with an intermittent missile to keep things interesting.
Stark's attacks however were not intended to severely damage, no use wasting his power when his backup was mere minutes away; nonetheless he made an effort to keep up an air of growing frustration. As Mercer practically danced around him he spouted colourful profanities and witty gripes that were just loud enough to hear. The monster himself leapt over lasers, hopped around explosions and ducked underneath shells, everything Iron Man sent his way, until the intended end result was soon achieved. Slowly but surely, Mercer was gracefully corralled to the end of the street and onto the carcass of a roundabout Stark had spied before the battle had begun: it was a clear, open battleground where the avengers could reliably gather and work together to bring Mercer down.
Alex had seemingly become secure in his agility and coolly bounded backwards into the middle of the square with his pale hands holstered in his trouser pockets. His eyes never once left Stark, who once again took to the skies and hovered assuredly, levelling Alex with a look of his own.
Then things suddenly got deathly quiet again.
For an extensive moment, no sound beyond the background noise of the surrounding city could be heard: there were distant whines of ambulance sirens, a recent and welcome replacement to the previous barking of gunshots and broken, chorused screams.
Stark once found himself sure he'd heard the howling of a dog.
Alex, in his exuberant silence, had become still, almost tranquilly so, as if he was listening to a song that no one else could hear; Iron Man decided that if Alex was going to make no move to attack or escape there was nothing else to do but settle and wait, though he remained airborne.
'Your friends are almost here' said Alex in an audible whisper.
'Finally decided to give up?' he replied, his voice sounding uncomfortably loud as it echoed around the colourless clearing.
Alex's low answer came a little while later, after a couple of seconds had passed, as if his movement was not all that had slowed in him.
'No, thank you,' his head swivelled as smoothly and ponderously as a cat's to lock his eyes on something faraway. 'I appreciate the offer though Stark, most prefer to try and kill me outright when they find me' his brow tensed ever so slightly as what Stark presumed were memories drifted listlessly across his small expression.
Stark now felt slightly confused: the Alex Mercer he'd been briefed on was not recorded as a brooding, taciturn character, more as a highly intelligent force of violent destruction and so far he'd certainly fulfilled his violent destruction quota but in doing so had acted in a way that was a far cry from the ruthless intelligence advertised in his files: he had immediately broken his cover to fight Iron Man, likely with full knowledge of the Avengers closing in on him from the start, unless Alex Mercer was actually a moron and they'd been lied to, what was he playing at?.
Then Alex smirked as faintly as he'd spoken 'I'm just enjoying the silence while it lasts'.
As he quieted again Stark watched him grow tense and retrained his aim, but even his armour-enhanced reflexes weren't enough to react fast enough to the speed at which Mercer twisted into the air and violently burst his arms into a giant, black shield to block the blow of the hammer that sent him crashing through several blocks of weary brick and mortar until he was over three streets away.
Stark blinked out of a revere that he hadn't realised he'd slipped into as Thor moved up to greet him with a hearty 'ho there!' and a powerful arm stretched out to beckon mojlnir.
'Well, you sure took your time' chuckled Iron Man.
'My apologies' replied Thor.
'I was being sarcastic, you actually got here before Cap y'know, that's... that's pretty surprising' even if he could fly.
'Now is not the time for levity'
'Humour has no schedule, buddy'
Thor, to his credit tried to push out a smirk but the result looked more like a sneer; Stark was beginning to worry that their debriefing on Mercer may have left his comrades more shaken than he'd expected.
He'd also pushed Mercer out of Stark's intended not-so-much-kill-as-take-down-zone.
'I would appreciate no distractions, friend Tony' said Thor briefly, grimly.
As much as Stark was worried, Thor was right (and stuffy as usual), there would be plenty of time for personal chit chat later anyway. Alex had yet to bring anything to the table that Stark would consider an serious threat to himself or his fellow avengers, heck, he'd been able to hold his own just fine so far, if he did say so himself; despite that however there was an uneasy feeling in the air that all was not as it seemed, it made his intuitions squirm and he suspected his teammate felt it as well.
He and Thor took off without another word and arced around the latest mushroom cloud that had bloomed three streets away from where they'd rendezvoused. They set themselves up on either side of the road.
Thor scanned the cloud with a keen Asguardian eye so Iron Man (now out of thermals to see things in nice, clear Technicolor) deferred to his judgement when he charged, headlong into the fog before a bellowing crash echoed around the vicinity.
there was a set of thunderous strikes that boomed and smacked beneath the obscurity before Thor was tossed out of the fog straight into Iron Man, sending them both tumbling to the ground.
Stark didn't have time to make a joke before Thor was dragged off him and thrown somewhere out of sight, to be replaced by Mercer, whose eyes lowered and regarded him with some inhuman emotion.
Alex sealed his arms to the asphalt with a pair of trunk like appendages that crashed onto his biceps and immediately tensed a set of thick, grey digits at their length.
then Iron Man heard his armour groan and a twinge of genuine fear twisted his heart.
He made to push his boots into Alex's chest and set his thrusters to maximum.
Mercer's chest and stomach were suddenly encased in armour making the virus-infected abomination looking suitably demonic as the fire lit up his bloody face.
Alex somehow managed to make his cold, harsh voice heard over the roar of Iron Man's suit's engines "I'm taking you out of the fight, Stark"
White hot pain exploded outward from his arms and Tony Stark screamed with his mauled armour.
Stark soon couldn't hear anything else as agony and a sudden influx of painkillers left the world mute; Alex was knocked off of him by a livid Captain America's shield as the ground began to rumble when an Asguardian god set his hammer to work and a great, green behemoth approached in leaps and bounds.
-(A/N) Okay yes I said I'd finish the fight so I know this is kind of cheating, just finishing Alex's fight with Iron Man, but rest assured: I haven't given up on this story yet, I have a plan and everything, reviews are nice, they let me know if I'm doing enough to entertain you or not.-