Fisk's ego was bigger than his body. He wouldn't stay cowed forever unless I did something very, very big. And he almost certainly knew where I lived, so I not only needed to redouble my efforts to get stronger, I had to shore up my weaknesses so he couldn't exploit them as he'd tried to do once already.
There were four main weaknesses of Symbiotes: Fire and Sonics were common knowledge. Then there was electricity, which seemed to be a sometimes thing unless you were derived from one of the dragons, and finally, there was Anti-Venom, that one white symbiote that could burn the hell out of all the others.
However, all four had been surmounted in various ways, to varying degrees, according to the knowledge that I had inherited from Carnage and picked up from skimming the hive mind.
Which is why I found myself sneaking into the tower formerly known as Stark late one night. Part of me felt bad about what I was doing... But legally, everything in here belonged to a man who was making giant genocidal murder bots and I can't help but feel that Mister Stark would rather I take one of his armors than leave it in the hands of this Feilong douchebag. I mean, if he knew I existed. Which he doesn't. And if he didn't have any other options, which he also doesn't.
This was a stealth mission. Unlike the CDC lab, this place had people working round the clock. Also, Carnage had literally just attacked it not too long ago, so they probably had anti-symbiote defense measures. That meant wallcrawling, camo, and slow, careful, quiet movements. Still, it's not like I could make my prey come to me.
Well, in theory, I could. After getting over my blind rage that I could no longer be reasonably considered human, I calmed down and assessed the situation. It sucks and it's going to keep sucking, but I was more... Aware, I guess you could say, of what my symbiote was made up of now that... Now that I was my symbiote. Deadpool hadn't gotten all of his codices from wearing symbiotes. He'd been through some real body horror-type situations and picked up a codex from a man named Cable who... Oh, where did I even begin with him? Seriously, I'm never time traveling if I could help it. To keep it short, not only was he a psychic so powerful that he could manhandle the Silver Surfer going all out, but he was infected with this parasitic living machine thing called the techno-organic virus that had all kinds of machine-related powers. Thing is? His psionics were unstable and the virus was eating him alive from the inside out, forcing him to use one to keep the other in check and vice versa.
His codex, in the decades he'd had it up until Deadpool inherited a piece, never figured out a satisfactory way to balance them or a way to compensate for their flaws, so it mostly just kept them both dormant within itself and now it was dormant in me. I could probably just brute force bypass that limit since it was self-imposed by a codex that was now part of me and use long-range technopathy to get what I want from Stark Tower... But that would almost certainly come back to bite me in the ass sooner or later, so a manual infiltration it was. I'd figure out how to tap into that massive power later.
The hardest part of infiltrating, honestly, was finding a way into the room the damn thing was kept in. I could sense the armor I was looking for but how did I find the way in?
Eventually, while stalking around the upper floors of the building looking for some clue I noticed the new CEO, that Feilong guy. I'd googled him before coming here just in case, since he had powers. Half Serbian, half Chinese. Both parents geniuses, claimed to be a blood relative of Nikola Tesla. Supposedly graduated college top of his class at 13 and started his first company at 15, made hundreds of millions in a short while, and then his parents allegedly robbed him blind and vanished. Then he started a second company dedicated to genetic engineering and environmental stuff with the goal of colonizing Mars only for the mutants to do it first. At some point, he turned red with white hair, colonized the Martian Moon Phobos I guess just to spite the mutants, and he could fire energy blasts out of his mouth.
A lot of stuff from his official backstory was uncited, however, and given that it makes him sound like a mary sue from some cheap fanfic and nobody's heard of him until a few years ago my gut instinct is that he made most of it the fuck up himself.
Anyway, he'd gotten up out of his office and was walking down toward an elevator on the far end of the top floor. I had no leads and nothing else better to do, so I followed him, skittering silently across the ceiling behind him and sliding smoothly into the elevator just before it closed. Worst case scenario, it's a waste of time. In the best-case scenario, he's going somewhere cool inside the building.
The elevator ride down felt like it was taking a lot longer than it should. I wasn't sure but it felt we were lower than the listed floors. And I could feel my target getting closer, so I had my fingers crossed.
Eventually, the doors opened up and I managed to quickly slink out and up a wall as Feilong slowly strutted out himself. The room was absolutely massive with high vaulted ceilings with the far wall being stacked high with what I could only describe as cubby holes each prominently displaying one of the like, 70 or so models of the Iron Man Armor.
Feilong was just standing there, admiring them like a man who peeked in high school admiring his sports trophies. Observing him, he paid particular attention to a damaged one that I think is the most recent model. In other words, to my perception, he was just silently gloating to himself about beating Iron Man.
God, what a loser.
Anyway, my attention was drawn to my target: A black and silver suit with light blue lighting elements. See, I'd taken a quick look at the codices I'd sensed in Mister Stark a few days ago, once I got plugged into the Hive Mind stronger... While they were most definitely on my list as soon as I could get them without hurting him, given the immense cosmic powers they'd been exposed to, what was most relevant right now is that, a few years ago when Mister Stark was turned evil by a magic spell, he dabbled in creating a living armor.
The Iron Man Model 50 "Endo-Sym," his codices told me when I reached out for them, was created by combining "building blocks" extracted from the biology of the symbiotes with nanomachines, high tech 'smart metals,' elements like graphene, and a few other things.
In terms of offensive capabilities, it wasn't that special. Just tendrils, thrusters in the arms for extra punching power, the ability to bulk up to Hulkbuster size, and the iconic repulsers and unibeam... But since Mister Stark was evil at the time, the repulsor tech weapons were a lot stronger and more lethal than on most suits.
It could also use those tendrils to interface with other tech, but I was mostly interested in its defensive capabilities, like the fact that it was very carefully hardened against sound-based and vibrational attacks.
And, since it worked like a symbiote, I really just needed to touch it to assimilate it into my own Living Abyss.
I just had to wait for Feilong here to leave so I could take it without being noticed and then I was out of here.
Any minute now...
Any minute now...
Twenty minutes. Twenty fucking minutes of the smug bastard basking in his perceived victory. With no end in sight.
Fuck it, once I had the armor I'd be able to take him. I backflipped up to the cubby where the Model 50 was displayed, which triggered an alarm. In for a penny, I dropped my camo and reached back, grabbing the repulsor node on the chest piece and merging just a tiny bit of my mass with that of the suit. The Endosym liquified and reformed around me, adjusting in shape to fit my body before threads of my mass began interfacing with it on the inside, causing its silver to be dyed red. I lept back down and landed in the middle of the room as Feilong clapped, deactivating the alarm.
He approached me as the armor finished meddling back into me. By the end, I was back to my normal appearance, except slightly more shiny.
"And just who are you?" He asked as if he was in full control of the situation. To be fair, he probably thought he was.
"Call me Massacre,"
"Well... Massacre, I'm going to need that armor back."
"I'm sorry, you can't have the armor anymore. It's mine now," I replied back.
He leaned back, inhaling, but I was faster and my reflexes were sharper. I formed a repulsor node in my palm and unleashed a full-powered blast just as Feilong exhaled a gout of pale seafoam-colored energy.
The beam of war barely lasted a second as the most lethal version of Iron Man's signature attack overwhelmed his blast and threw him back into a wall. He was still alive, judging from how he was twitching, but I wasn't quite sure how. The expression of confusion on his unconscious face was priceless though.
My legs buckled for a moment. At first, I was confused, but then I recalled a fact that I'd overlooked before. The Endo-Sym didn't have a primary internal Arc Reactor. All that energy I'd just used had to come from somewhere, so when I'd expended its auxiliary power it must have tapped it from my metabolism... Thank god Stark Tech was so energy efficient.
I yawned. I'd need to get back to my base and get some rest soon. Hopefully, Fisk had enough of a sense of self-preservation not to have had it trapped or trashed yet.
Still. This had been a good day and it felt nice to be the one kicking ass for once.