“Explain to me what happened, again,” Spitfire sighed at her desk. “You’re saying Lieutenant Dash suddenly blasted Master Sergeant Dust straight across the room? Is that it?”
“Mhmm, pretty much,” Fleetfoot replied. “Me, Surprise, we all saw it. Still working out what we saw, but we saw it. Ma’am, Rainbow’s been off since the ASIS crash, something’s going on with her. Hell, something’s been off about this whole thing. You sure she didn’t gain superpowers from the crash?”
“That’s a leap in logic Fleets,” Spitfire said. “We’re living in the real world, not in some comic book.”
“And yet Rainbow… well, you heard what Rainbow did,” Fleetfoot replied.
“I know what I heard, not what I saw,” Spitfire replied. “For all I know, Rainbow just punched Lightning Dust very hard and you guys were drunk enough to assume ‘superpowers’.”
“I dunno, Lawson was pretty quiet on that plane of his. It could be powered by some fancy alien tech for all I know, and when it crashed...” Fleetfoot went on, starting to pace in worry. “I dunno, there’s something off about him. The whole squad’s picked up on it, nobody’s said anything but there’s something weird about the guy.”
“And this is relevant how?” Spitfire said peering at Fleetfoot through her glasses. “I have one of my best pilots in the hospital for… apparently blasting another pilot across the room with an energy blast. Got scientists from some government agency with an acronym I can’t be bothered to remember running tests on her, apparently. I don’t actually give two hoots in hell about Lawson and whatever secrets he’s apparently hiding. What I do give two hoots in hell about is my pilot. So unless you’ve got news relating to her, GET OUT!”
Fleetfoot noticeably flinched from Spitfire’s order, barked at her like that of an angry guard dog’s. Holding up her hands in a defensive manner, she nodded weakly. “Okay, okay. Getting out, ma’am. Jeez…”
Quickly scampering out like a cowed puppy, Fleetfoot shut the door with a noticeable sense of urgency.
Spitfire sighed and placed her face into her hands with a groan. Taking off her sunglasses, she rubbed her temples. This week was getting worse all the time…
Another knock at the door.
“Look, Fleetfoot, if this is about you coming up with another excuse for…” Spitfire grumbled. “Then you can just save it, alright? Superpowers don’t exist, end of story.”
The door creaked open.
“Then you’re living in a different world than I,” said a man’s voice, and in walked this man in a nicely trimmed and rather sharp suit. He had short brown hair, maybe nearing middle age. “My name is Agent Philip Coulson. I represent a certain division of the United States Government. We call ourselves the Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division.”
“Try fitting that one on a business card,” Spitfire deadpanned.
“We’re working on it,” said Coulson, taking a sip of his coffee. “We’ve met before. Well, not ‘we’ we, but we were at the Detroit Steel testing.”
“Oh right, I saw some of you suits hanging around,” Spitfire remembered. “You all looked very official, men in black types. All sweltering in the heat, honestly if your division can’t provide you with a cold glass of water…”
“I’ll send a complaint up the ladder next time I’m back at the base,” Agent Coulson said. “But yes, Lieutenant Dash. You’d be surprised at what makes it onto the internet. We’re working to scrub all footage from anyone’s web page, Youtube or anywhere else we can find. Maybe replace them with cat videos, everyone loves those right?”
“Can you just get to the point?” Spitfire asked with a sigh.
“You believe superpowers don’t exist, I’m here to educate you to the contrary. Superpowers do exist, they’re just not public knowledge. Wouldn’t want to freak the public out, right?” asked Agent Coulson. “Go deep on the Dark Web, and you’ll find plenty of evidence to the contrary of your beliefs.”
“So what you’re saying is…” Spitfire trailed off.
“Oh yes, quite,” Agent Coulson replied. “One of these days, superpowers will be out in the open. We’re, or should I say my boss is on the lookout for any individuals with special abilities, it was pure luck we found Rainbow.”
“So what, is this the part where you swear me to secrecy and take Rainbow away to some black site lab?” Spitfire said, reaching for her gun under the table.
“The swear you to secrecy part, yes. The black site lab part, no. Ideally, we’d like to take her to Project Pegasus. You can look it up on Google,” said Agent Coulson. “But something tells me you’d fight me tooth and nail to stop me. In any other situation, I’d tase you until you were a drooling mess on the carpet and watch Supernanny, but then again my boss ordered me to make nice.”
“Well, glad we understand each other then,” Spitfire replied dryly. “I’m not letting anyone pick apart one of my best pilots.”
“Your loyalty is to be admired. In any event, you should know Philip Lawson was working for us. Developing a new fighter jet for our division, maybe one day it’d make it’s way to the Air Force. However, that’s only the first half of the story,” said Agent Coulson digging some files out of his suit. He laid them on Spitfire’s desk, and her eyes widened as she saw a glowing cube of energy in one of the many pictures provided. “We call it the Tesseract, some sort of ‘cosmic cube’ we dredged up out of the ocean shortly after WW2 ended. The Nazis were all abuzz about it, apparently Hydra had it before us.”
“And you don’t think you should have left it in the ocean?” Spitfire deadpanned. “Anything Hydra finds interesting, chances are it’s probably going to blow us all to kingdom come if you poke and prod at it long enough.”
“Well…” Agent Coulson flushed.
“...and you did just that didn’t you?” Spitfire sighed. “Let me guess, you reverse-engineered it or rather Lawson reverse-engineered it, and instead of just leaving it well enough alone AS YOU SHOULD HAVE, you stick it in the ASIS.”
“Yes… that is what happened,” Agent Coulson admitted. “Our working theory is that the explosion tossed cosmic energy onto Rainbow, but that shouldn’t be enough to…”
“What, a bath of cosmic energy isn’t ‘enough’ to give someone superpowers?” Spitfire deadpanned, in a skeptical tone of voice.
“Something had to catalyze it,” Agent Coulson said. “Had to make the energy active. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t live in a world based on comic books. Just getting bathed in cosmic energy won’t be enough to give you superpowers. Something had to have activated that energy… But what?”
Spitfire’s eyes narrowed after she thought for a moment. She reached for her phone and dialed a number. “Soarin’, get Lawson in here. I want to talk to him.”
So how did it start? How did the saga of the Mandarin begin? Well, the name itself, it meant adviser to the King. And the first Mandarin was exactly this, an adviser to the great Ghengis Khan himself. His name, alas, has been lost to history. But what little we do know involves him being behind some of Khan’s greatest campaigns, Ghengis spoke of him often as his most trusted and only friend in a court of lions.
That was centuries ago, this was now. The year was 1968, the height of the Vietnam War. Yes, feel free to play your Fortunate Son and get that Forrest Gump reference out of your head. Okay, have you done that yet? Good.
The man that was responsible for ‘creating’ the Mandarin as we know him was one John F. Walker. Born in the little town of Custer's Grove, Georgia, our Captain was currently mud deep in the jungles of Vietnam. It had been a hot and sweaty campaign, and word had reached him that the Viet Cong were holed up in a town just a mile or so away, on the river. Control the river, control the supply lines for this entire region.
It was crucial that this town was re-taken.
“So, boys, you all know the mission. Get in, get out, and make sure nobody who even thinks the word ‘Red’ is left alive.” said Walker as they slashed through the jungles, rushing through the underbrush like devils under the coating of darkness. Nothing good could come of their arrival, and just like Afghanistan in the coming decades, with war brought atrocity. Families displaced, homes reduced to rubble. All in the name of freedom and security. Whatever helped the men of the Strategic Scientific Reserve sleep at night. Whatever helped the soldiers sleep at night.
“Who’s strong and brave here to save the American Way…” someone hummed under their breath, and John smiled to himself. He’d always idolized Captain America, thought that the world always needed a new one. Someone to hold up the values of America, what she stood for. If he had to be the one to do the holding, so be it.
“So, John,” asked another of his troops. “You got a girl back home right? Waiting on you with mom’s sweet sweet apple pie? A hug and a kiss for you?”
“Oh, fantasize about your own girlfriend, Bill!” John laughed, gently punching the man in the shoulder as they continued their long, slow march through the undergrowth. “Pretty sure she’s beautiful enough for you!”
“Assuming he even has one!” another of John’s troops hollered and laughter lit up the forest.
Another slash and another fern fell to their swords of flame. John wiped the sweat off his brow and sighed. Another day on the job, he got all the dirty work. All in the name of Freedom, right? Those people back home, the civilians, the ones protesting the war? They didn’t know what it was like out here. They hadn’t sweated and toiled in the hot sun, they hadn’t shed blood for their country. They didn’t have the right to call themselves Americans. No, when you bled and died for your country, that was when and only when you had the right to call yourself a true American.
Captain America hadn’t gone into battle against the German war machine just a few short decades prior because they worried about what people back home thought of them. No, they had a job to do and they just did it. They signed up to kill Nazis, and they killed Nazis. John had signed up to kill the Viet Cong and so he killed the Viet Cong. He was a soldier, he did what he was told.
He pointed his gun, he carried his rifle and he marched through some of the worst conditions imaginable just so the communist reds wouldn’t get a foothold here. So what if some people died, this was war! A little bit of blood spread was inevitable. Simple as that. War was an ugly business, yeah, but it was war. The people back home didn’t understand that, they hadn’t jumped headlong into battle with fear of death at their side. They hadn’t charged into battle, boots trench deep in mud with rifle in hand and the Marine Corp at their side. The full might of the USA was bearing down on Vietnam like a thunderstorm, no a hurricane and John Walker was just another cog in the machine. His codename may have been the US Agent, but he was a simple soldier, nothing more.
Gunfire split through the town, as the soldiers of the 20th Infantry Regiment charged in. Screams of the dying filled the air, with the thunder of guns accompanying them. The tiger in John’s chest beat out a symphony, a symphony of death, and his thoughts were filled with the awards he was sure to receive for striking a blow for freedom.
A tower came crumbling down, a massive brass bell crashing to the earth giving out its final ring. The town was Sơn Mỹ, a name that would eventually go down in infamy after the events of today. Walker would later be charged with criminal offenses, though he would not receive a conviction. Absolute bullshit, he’d call the charges. He was just doing his duty. The most shocking episode of the Vietnam War? Every war had it’s ‘shocking moment’. WW2, the Jungholzhausen massacre. But they had it coming, those in the Waffen SS. And these reds had what was coming to them, he reasoned. War was war. Such was the way of things.
What he did not know however was that troops under his command had been one of many platoons that had slaughtered families. One child amongst many had been deprived of his family, and the image of John Walker’s infamous red and white shield had been forever burned into his mind. Xin Zhang was that child, and in a few decades he’d go by a codename of his own. The Mandarin.
To John Walker’s credit, if he had known, he might have felt shock and horror at all of this. But to Xin, that didn’t matter. The stars and spangles were now his enemy, and he would train himself to one day topple the USA.
He traveled the world, learning the ways he might defeat any enemy he would come across. His mother said he was descended from that Mongol adviser who helped lead Ghengis Khan to victory.
His mother said he was destined for greatness.
And then his mother was slaughtered like a dog.
Rage coursed through his being, fueling his fire. In another life, the Mandarin might have never come to being, or maybe he would have in but a different form. Perhaps a hero. We may never know.
There were legends about Ghengis Khan of course, of how he had been gifted a suit of armor by his loyal adviser, and ten rings of great power. The rings had been passed down to his children, or at least that had been Khan’s original plan. Then his children proved themselves unworthy, and so what did Khan do? He scattered the rings in hidden temples all around the globe, hoping one day someone might prove themselves worthy of their power.
Xin intended to find these rings.
Rumors tended to travel fast in the criminal underworld, and Xin had immersed himself in it’s depths. He studied in darkness, learning every ability he could. Every trick of the trade. Every form of self-defense imaginable, from Muay Tai to Savate. He wanted to be the man his mother always dreamed he could be.
He wanted to do her proud.
As for John Walker, eventually, the US pulled out of Vietnam after years of mounting protests. The Winter Soldier Inquiries had found most of his squad guilty of unspeakable things. Things John Walker never imagined they could do. He had never been convicted of anything, but public opinion in the new era’s ‘Captain America’ had fallen right to the floor. He’d been quietly shuffled off into a place where he couldn’t do much damage.
And he hated every moment of it. The Strategic Scientific Reserve went by a different name now. They called themselves the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division. What a mouthful, John grumbled to himself. The year was 1986. The war had long since been over, at least to most people. John longed for it, he had been reborn in combat. He’d found himself a purpose, and just because a few men committed unspeakable acts, that purpose had been ripped away from him.
Some things had changed, some had not. The enemies were still the Soviets, but instead of jungle wars in foreign countries, it was now a ‘cold war’ of sorts. No violence, no bloodshed. It was an age of spies and paranoia now. For his part, John Walker had been relegated to mostly occasional public appearances, to show the strength of the US. To show it wouldn’t fall to Gorbachev’s evergrowing reach.
Right now? He found himself on an archeology dig in the Sahara of all places following an old lead dug up by director Peggy Carter. Back during The War, a Hydra plane had gone down here, carrying… something. The Soviets couldn’t have it. Not now, not ever.
They’d reached out to local help, as who knew the desert better than those who lived in it? Agreements were signed. People sworn to secrecy. Whatever they found here could never be spoken of.
Oddly, it wasn’t all bedouins and the like. There was a man from Asia amongst them, looking to be in his early twenties. He seemed more focused than the rest, like he had a purpose beyond just living day to day in the desert.
“Afternoon!” John greeted the digger, who didn’t meet his eyes. “So, you’re Chinese right?”
“Vietnamese, actually,” the man corrected.
“Long way from home, aren’t you?” John said.
“The same could be said about you,” the man replied and John laughed.
“Fair enough!” he agreed. “So, what brings you all the way out here?”
“What brings you all the way out here?” the Vietnamese man replied. Tents dotted the landscape, pure white as snow. The sun beat down hard like the devil’s inferno, and sweat rolled down everyone’s faces like tidal waves.
John sniffed his armpit and recoiled. God, he stunk! He spied a set of rings on his new friend’s fingers. It caught his attention.
“Interesting rings,” he remarked. “You get it in a marketplace?”
“Something like that,” said the Vietnamese man even as his shovel hit metal. A shout rang out over the pit as more shovels unearthed their prize. Hidden deep beneath the sands, the desert finally gave up its secret. The infamous swastika shone in the sun. Nazi gold, at least of a sort. Soon, the plane was pried open, and out came a box covered in jade and ancient texts. Before anyone could kick it open however, there came more shouting.
Desert bandits! Nobody knew where they had come from, it was like they’d appeared out of nowhere. Xin smiled to himself, even as John roared out: “The devil the luck! It’s like we’re excavating Tutankhamun's tomb or something!”
John went for his gun and fired off several shots topping a bandit from off his horse. Xin took advantage of the chaos and the confusion, reaching into the box and ripping a ring from it. It glowed at the touch. Even as dust kicked up, Xin broke into a sprint and kicked another of the men off of his horse. The winds began to howl, and someone let out a shout of: “Sandstorm!”
Xin covered his face, and his horse galloped across the sands. John and his men would be fine, he had what he’d come for. The Vortex Ring was his, and now he could continue his search for the next ring. One always eluded him, the Remaker. The most powerful of them all…
That was then, this was now. That was the Sahara Desert in Egypt, this was the United States and the city of Canterlot.
“Want to explain something?” Spitfire asked, peering through her glasses at Philip. “Out with it Lawson! You know something we don’t. I’ve got a pilot being poked and prodded at by the Strategic Homeland… whatever and I want answers. What do you know?”
Lawson sighed. “First off, my name isn’t Philip Lawson. It’s Mar-Vehl,” he said as his entire form changed. Gone was the appearance of a simple blond scientist, and instead that of a blue-skinned man, straight out of a sci-fi pulp novel. “Geheneris Hala'son Mar-Vehl, Captain of the Kree Void Navy.”
A small breathy “Good lord!” came from Agent Coulson, the man taking several steps back in shock.
“So you’re an alien,” Spitfire said with Mar-Vehl nodding.
“It was implied, yes,” the space soldier said. “I assure you, I bring you no harm. I’m only here to study Earth.”
“Funny job for a Captain to be doing…” Spitfire said skeptically.
“Yes, well, we all have our hobbies. I’ve always been interested in your planet, you call it Earth, the Kree call it C-53. Guess which name I prefer more, actually…” Mar-Vehl chuckled. “Honestly, my race has no sense of imagination…”
“Coming from someone who’s basically named ‘Marvel’?” Spitfire laughed. “You want to explain what you’re really doing here before I shove this boot of mine somewhere where the sun don’t shine?”
“...am I supposed to guess where that is?” Mar-Vehl asked not really familiar with as many Earth phrases as he’d like to be.
“Your ass!” both Agent Coulson and Spitfire yelled in unison.
“I already said, I came to study Earth.”
“As a prelude to invasion?” Agent Coulson asked. “Because usually, that’s how this goes, right? You report back to your superiors on our defenses and then everything goes all War of the Worlds. I’ve seen the movies. I’ve got an entire Netflix catalog of alien invasion movies. Just ask Agent Romanoff.”
“Trust me, if the Kree were to come, they’d have come in force. Earth would have never stood a chance,” said Mar-Vehl. “To them, Earth’s… boring. Another planet to add to the list, C-53 is just ‘there’.”
“You said ‘would’ as in past tense. What makes you think we stand a chance now?” Agent Coulson asked, his and Spitfire’s guns still trained on Mar-Vehl.
“That… may be down to me. You asked me what’s wrong with Lieutenant Rainbow,” Mar-Vehl sighed to himself. “I may or may not have performed an involuntary blood transfusion.”
“You did what?” Spitfire snarled.
“It was the only way to save her life!” Mar-Vehl shouted back. “She was dying, and I couldn’t just stand around doing nothing! Your Earth doctors wouldn’t be able to save her, so when nobody was looking I gave her some of my blood. I didn’t think it would even do anything, I swear!”
“And yet Master Sergeant Dust is inclined to disagree,” Agent Coulson deadpanned. “Oh, I don’t know how we’re going to explain this one to her family.”
“Say it was a gas explosion,” Mar-Vehl replied. “Isn’t that what you usually go for? I’ve seen some of your government's excuses, they’re pretty bad and yet people still buy them anyways.”
“Man’s got a point,” Spitfire agreed before grumbling to herself: “I can’t believe I’m agreeing with the alien. Hell, I can’t believe I’m even talking to an alien…”
“I’m happy to expand your horizons then,” Mar-Vehl chuckled before he sighed to himself. “But… yes, I’m the reason why Lieutenant Dash has superpowers.”
“I’m assuming you know just what superpowers she has?” Spitfire asked on a whim.
“By my calculations, she should have all the abilities of a Kree, at the very least. Her muscles would be enhanced beyond normal human capacity, she would be gifted with superhuman speed, strength, and reflexes,” Mar-Vehl theorized.
“So she’s a regular Captain America, great. What about the energy blasts?” Spitfire asked.
“They’re technically photonic blasts,” Mar-Vehl corrected her.
“I don’t care!” Spitfire shouted back.
“She was infused with the energy of the Tesseract, or at least some of it. I can only guess what that cosmic radiation did to her after I activated it. Which I did not intend to do, by the way,” Mar-Vehl replied.
“And yet you did anyways,” Agent Coulson sighed, rubbing his temples. Oh, General Fury was going to love this. “So what do you think she’ll be able to do? Beyond the whole… blasting someone into a wall bit and all.”
“I can only theorize,” Mar-Vehl replied. “It could be anything from transforming like a Skrull to-”
“I’m sorry, a Skrull?”
“Another alien race,” Mar-Vehl informed. “Nasty bastards, look like orcs from World of Warcraft. For the Horde!”
“For the Horde!” Agent Coulson agreed on reflex. “Oh, did you see the new expansion? I have a few complaints but…”
“Can we get back on topic here?” Spitfire asked, annoyed. “The superpowers, please?”
“Yes, right…” and if it was possible for a Kree to flush, Mar-Vehl was probably doing so. “She has the ability to manipulate the very energy of the cosmos. I’m theorizing, completely unbound, she would have the abilities of exothermic manipulation, flight, energy absorption… Basically, she hit the lottery.”
Spitfire and Agent Coulson shared a look. “...oh dear lord.”
“One way to put it I guess,” Mar-Vehl admitted.
“I… I gotta contact Director Fury,” Agent Coulson said rapidly. “He needs to know about this.”
“And have your Strategic Homeland boys crawling all over my base again?” Spitfire asked. “No damn way I’m going to allow that to happen!”
“Look, you heard La… Mar-Vehl yourself. Rainbow’s a living binary star now, she needs to be…”
“Poked and prodded at?” Spitfire challenged.
“Restrained,” Agent Coulson said before sending the woman his best reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, we don’t treat people like lab rats. We’re not that kind of agency. Oh, and one more thing?”
“What’s that?” Spitfire asked.
“Call us SHIELD.”
Miles away, in Afghanistan, Silver Zoom found himself with a new challenge. Obviously, you couldn’t just wait and watch for a pot to boil, so you had to do something else in the meantime. Namely, clear out some terrorist scum from a village and give some villagers some peace of mind.
And nothing said ‘clearing out terrorist scum’ like a giant mech suit. Landing in the middle of the occupied village with an almighty earthshaking thud, and a near-perfect three-point landing, Detroit Steel advanced.
Gunfire rattled off the giant mech suit’s star-spangled hide, red white, and blue flavored justice about to be dispensed. Someone hidden in the blown-out walls of what was once someone’s family home trained a rocket launcher on the suit and fired. Smoke and fire erupted from Detroit Steel’s metallic hide, the massive armor suit sliding backwards in the sand. Silver Zoom winced, his hud flashing as it designated heat signatures all around him.
One arm went up, and bullets flew as the mech suit’s heavy cannon went ‘rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat!’ with gold shell casings littering the ground as terrorists were turned to bloody chunks. The squirt beeped out a warning as another missile came screaming towards it. Silver Zoom sidestepped, before ripping up a piece of rubble out of the ground and tossing it towards the oncoming instrument of destruction.
WHOOOMMP! A searing blast of heat scalded the suit, turning blue to gray. Like a deadly dancer Detroit Steel became, spinning in a blaze of gunfire. Dust and sand were kicked up in the process as the terrorists reaped the whirlwind. Like a beautiful disaster, the battle became, the blood and violence a poetic metaphor for this part of the world. A masterwork of artistic chaos, with the giant metal boot of America attempting to step in and save the day.
And then all went silent, as a tank fired upon the giant suit sending it crashing into the ruins of another house. Treads cracked the earth, rattling and shaking as the massive mechanical monster moved in for the kill. Detroit Steel’s eyes had gone dim, the tank closing in. Then, eyes glowed a sharp gold as the beast awoke, chainsaw revving up for doomsday as it sliced the tank in half. The molten metal fell to the earth, the great beast scoring another kill.
But every great beast had the perfect hunter to bring it down. And today, that hunter was Xin Zhang. Great lightning scorched Detroit Steel’s hide, the air scorched with ozone. “Like an obedient dog, you come.”
More lightning ripped through the air, slashing and striking at America’s great war machine. It staggered, armor scorching and smoking.
“Are you one of Stark’s little toys?” Xin asked. “Seems like something he’d build, really. You’ve got a great grift Stark, sell the people out here weapons, and then you come to blow them up! Rinse and repeat!”
With a wave of his hand, Silver Zoom found himself frozen to the ground as the robed man stepped forwards.
“The Mandarin, I presume?” Silver Zoom grunted out, as he lurched forwards, struggling to free his suit from the ice. It began to crack and shatter, but before he could move again, he felt a great pressing force. Stronger than anything he had ever felt before, actually. It weighed down upon him, pressing him deeper and deeper into the earth.
“So, the first thing you do is try and attack me, Stark?” the Mandarin asked, and with a wave of his hand summoned a glass of wine. “Come on, I thought you were a businessman. A jet setter right? Have some class. Want some? Cabernet Sauvignon, imported from the old country.”
“So you’re a man of culture and a terrorist,” Silver said. “Huh, cute.”
“Ah ah, not a terrorist. A teacher,” said the Mandarin, taking a sip of his wine. “There is a difference.”
“Doesn’t matter to me. You’re about to be a dead teacher!” said Silver as he finally broke free, with Xin sighing.
“Oh well, I try to educate… It seems I must inflict punishment instead,” he said before armor covered him, black as carbon.
“Hey, I thought you were Chinese,” Silver asked. “Not some sort of Samurai!”
“I am a Shì,” said the Mandarin, nearly caving in Silver’s armor with one punch. “Again, another lesson I must impart. This armor was gathered by the great Ghengis Khan himself! At the height of his power, he conquered nearly four times the amount of land of Alexander the Great. Hmm, not so ‘great’ when you put it that way…”
“Yeah, a real role model,” Silver said, slashing at the Mandarin with the suit’s chainsaw, only he be blasted back by a firebolt. The Mandarin reached out, grabbed him, and lifted him overhead before slamming him bodily into the earth.
“I believe this match is over,” said the Mandarin as a ring on his hand began to glow. “Another time, then? Maybe we can discuss this like more civilized people at a later date. But until then, consider this a message to your United States. The Mandarin is power!”
And with that, Silver Zoom found himself teleported away, and left at the doorstep of the White House...