The chamber shuddered with a low, metallic growl as the false Iron Man tore through the sealed wall like paper.
Tony backpedaled, palms glowing as he activated his nano-repair subroutines. Parts of his chestplate were scorched, cracked from the last impact. But he didn't have time to fix them—not now.
The fake stepped forward, slow, deliberate.
Its eyes glowed with inverted light. Instead of blue, they pulsed red and violet. Unnatural. Corrupted. Alive with doom.
Dr. Doom's voice filtered through the double's comm system, a deep, droning whisper laced in static:
"You're not fighting a copy, Stark. You're fighting the code you abandoned. The algorithm you buried... rewritten by me."
Tony's pulse spiked.
The Predictive Combat Algorithm.
He remembered it now—his old failsafe. A system he built post-Ultron to calculate enemy behavior. Too dangerous. Too adaptive. He'd shut it down before Endgame.
But Doom didn't delete it.
He perfected it. And weaponized it—by giving it form.
"This thing isn't a copy of me," Tony muttered. "It's the ghost of every wrong turn I ever made."
The corrupted suit—now dubbed IRON DOOM in Tony's HUD—attacked.
It moved with chilling accuracy, preempting every dodge, countering every repulsor strike. Tony barely kept up, skimming along the floor, flipping over debris, deflecting with pulse shields that shattered like glass.
Each punch the double threw came inches from killing him.
But then—a flicker.
Tony noticed it.
Every time Doom's puppet made a move, there was a 0.3-second delay in its adaptive response.
A glitch?
No. A memory loop.
"You're still running my old code," Tony whispered.
He dove behind a scorched pillar, tore a wire from his suit's wrist and slammed it into the exposed wall.
"F.R.I.D.A.Y.," he gasped. "Ping the anomaly in the Predictive Combat Tree. Feed it false patterns."
The AI paused.
"Forging decoy timelines… now."
Across the room, IRON DOOM twitched. Its movements stuttered.
The visuals blurred.
Suddenly Tony launched—a full-body missile assault from his shoulders, a move he never used because it overheated the suit.
The explosions bathed the chamber in fire.
Flames licked the walls. Dust filled the air. For a moment, silence.
Then... a hand emerged from the smoke.
Half the corrupted helmet was blown off.
And beneath the synthetic shell, Tony saw something inhuman. Not mechanical.
Not digital.
But flesh.
His stomach dropped.
"He… put someone inside it?" he whispered, horrified.
The mask hissed and peeled open.
Inside, a younger Tony Stark stared back at him—eyes hollow, face stitched with machine seams.
"Hello, me," it said with a twisted grin. "He didn't just copy your code. He copied your mind."
Tony stumbled backward. "You're… me?"
"The version you were never allowed to be. The one who didn't stop at Endgame. The one who said—what if I could save everyone… by controlling everything."
Then the chamber trembled again.
And a temporal breach opened behind the fake Tony—crackling, howling, like time itself was screaming.
"He's calling the others," F.R.I.D.A.Y. warned. "Other versions. Other failures. Other… Starks."
One by one, dark silhouettes began to emerge from the breach.
Iron suits with skull-like designs. Crimson reactors. Some missing faces, others with glowing eyes and twisted limbs. All of them walked like ghosts.
Tony backed up slowly.
He was no longer fighting a mirror.
He was facing the Legion of Iron Doom
As the multiverse cracks, multiple twisted Stark variants cross into his reality—each representing a version of him that should never have existed.
And they've all been summoned by one purpose:
Erase the original.