Chapter 826 - Sprinkling Salt on the Tycoon's Wound
Chapter 826: Sprinkling Salt on the Tycoon’s Wound
At a gala last night, Obadiah confessed to Tony that he was selling arms to Afghanistan. He was also the one who persuaded the board to remove Tony from his position.
They parted on bad terms.
But Tony didn’t expect that after making things clear last night, Obadiah would dare take his life today.
The temporary paralysis device next to Tony’s ear was something he invented.
It hadn’t obtained approval from the Department of Defense, so he stopped developing it.
But the DoD had tested the temporary paralysis device before.
Activating it for five seconds would cause the target to be paralyzed for five minutes. During that time, it would be hard for them to move or talk.
If this went on for a minute, the brain would be damaged, and the patient would become mentally crippled.
If it lasted for more than five minutes, the patient would become a brain-dead vegetable, which was equivalent to dying on the spot.
In other words, Obadiah had only left Tony with the last few minutes of his life.
Tony couldn’t think of anything.
He couldn’t move right now, and only an external force could save him.
He struggled to make even the smallest sound, not much better than a mosquito.
Jarvis, who could control the robots in the room, shouldn’t have shut down, but Tony couldn’t tell Jarvis that it was his own invention that had caused this.
Tony was both angry and aggrieved.
He hadn’t expected his inventions to one day be used against him, and so successfully.
If I invent anything for anyone else in the future, I’m a pig! Tony swore inwardly.
Time passed quickly; in just thirty seconds, Tony was starting to become muddle-headed. As his vision went dark, he only heard a faint crack, as if something wooden had broken.
…
While Obadiah was educating his nephew, Luke, who was wearing his Terminator armor, kicked two gangsters, and they hit the wall of an apartment.
The man and woman who had been laughing loudly next door paused for a moment, before the man’s voice rang out. “I know, boss, I know. I’ll tell her to keep her voice down.”
The couple on the other side of the thin wall covered their mouths and muffled their voices. Finally, it wasn’t so noisy anymore.
Luke chuckled. It’s fine. Even if you scream your lungs out now, nobody will care.
He grabbed the bags of white crystals in the room and threw them into the sink. As he turned on the tap, he cut the plastic bags apart with a kitchen knife.
At that moment, he heard an alert in his earpiece. “Iron Man’s distress signal has appeared.”
Luke paused for a moment, then dashed out of the apartment and went straight to the top floor.
By the time he reached the top of the building, he had already put on his Batman armor. Taking a running leap, he glided away.
The cape on his back had turned into a high-speed flight suit which he rarely used, and there was a propulsion system with three jets on his back.
He instantly activated Speed Mode, and the flight suit drew an upward arc in the air as it charged toward Malibu Beach in the northwest.
Using the pager, Luke arrived at Tony’s place in five minutes.
When he was still far away, he looked down and saw that the villa, which used to have a lot of lights, was dark, like a haunted house.
He didn’t stop. He descended from the sky and landed in front of the villa.
Luke broke the lock and opened the door. He quickly entered the living room and saw Tony collapsed on the couch.
At the same time, there was a tiny but unpleasant howling in the room.
Elementary Sound Wave keenly captured the source of the sound. Luke swiped at his waist and threw out a bat dart, which sent the flashing red device next to Tony’s ear flying ten meters away.
The device hit the wall and turned off, and the noise promptly stopped.
Luke wasn’t in a hurry to go forward. Instead, he activated Sharp Nose as well as the oxygen supply system inside the armor.
He wasn’t sure how Tony had turned out like this. He had to be careful.
Otherwise, if he got pulled in while saving someone else, he probably wouldn’t die, but there would be no hope for the tycoon.
A few seconds later, Sharp Nose confirmed that there was no poisonous gas in the room.
The armor’s smart program had also analyzed that the screaming device was a subsonic weapon that could paralyze a person and make it difficult for them to move.
Tony had probably been taken down by this device.
After checking on Tony, Luke looked at the pale young man and the hole in his T-shirt. He sighed. “Who set you up? Also, is there something missing from your chest?”
What a dimwit, Luke grumbled inwardly.
Tony regained a little consciousness at that moment and said in a daze, “You’re here?”
He then suddenly came back to himself and struggled to think. “I’m not dead?”
His voice was a soft groan. Thanks to Luke’s close proximity and keen ears, he was able to hear it clearly.
Luke locked onto the basement with Sharp Nose and left with Tony. “You’re not dead yet, but I don’t know if you’ll die without that thing in your chest.”
Tony struggled to catch his breath, only to find that he was being supported by Luke as he moved forward. Luke’s words weren’t reliable, but his arms were steady.
He struggled to speak again. “It was Obadiah. He took the reactor from my chest. It’s something I’m using to pull on the shrapnel in my chest. Without it, the shrapnel will flow into my heart.”
Luke said, “Hm, and you’ll be dead by then, right?”
Tony’s face turned pale. “Yes.”
“Where’s the backup reactor?” Luke asked even though he knew the answer.
Tony: “…I didn’t build a backup reactor.”
He had been busy fiddling with the armor recently. He fell out with Obadiah and went to Afghanistan to fight a bunch of terrorists; when would he have thought of creating a backup reactor?
Even the crude arc reactor was enough for him to live for fifty lifetimes, and he had only made the new reactor when he came back. He was still a long way from running out of energy, so he had never thought about making a backup reactor.
Luke had already noticed something set up in a glass container on the table. He chuckled inwardly: the tycoon’s luck was back.
But he couldn’t help but sprinkle salt on the tycoon’s wounds again. “Oh, Tony Stark doesn’t have the money to make extra components anymore? Your company’s stock price may have dropped a little, but it can’t be that poor, right?”
Tony was lost for words.
He couldn’t refute the fact that he indeed hadn’t created a backup reactor.
Luke, however, had already led him to a table and picked up a glass container. “Hm, what’s this? A special LED lamp?”
The familiar blue and white light flashed before Tony’s eyes, and he suddenly jerked. “An arc reactor? Where did it come from?”