Obadiah's Rampage

Sherlock did not go looking for Tony. Instead, he went straight back to his apartment.

Unlike Tony, since Sherlock had decided to take revenge on Obadiah, he intended to leave Obadiah with nothing and ruin his reputation before he died.

So, the first thing Sherlock did after returning was mail the compiled information in batches to major television stations in Los Angeles.

Nor did Sherlock spare the online blogs and bloggers who were obsessed with exposing secrets.

Given the nature of the United States media, along with those exposé bloggers, the Scavenger Company scandal had become a massive public controversy by that afternoon, directly pressuring the Los Angeles police.

It even reached the highest levels and prompted the FBI to step in and begin an investigation.

Unlike the local Los Angeles police department, the FBI was the Federal Bureau of Investigation and had nationwide law enforcement authority.

That meant that even if Obadiah could influence the local law enforcement agencies' investigation, he had no way to interfere with the FBI's investigation into the Scavenger Company.

What? Wasn't Obadiah a senior executive at Stark Industries? As part of Stark Industries, which had countless ties to the military, could Obadiah really not influence the FBI?

The truth was, he really couldn't!

Not to mention that Tony had already shut down Stark Industries' weapons manufacturing division, effectively severing its ties with the military. Even if those ties had remained, the company was called Stark Industries, not Obadiah Industries.

So, when facing the FBI's investigation, all Obadiah could do was mobilize every bit of his "connections" and "resources" to distance himself from the Scavenger Company.

Sherlock was no fool. He naturally knew that the so-called "Scavenger Company" could not truly cause Obadiah any substantial harm. But what Sherlock wanted was precisely for Obadiah to go through the process of using his "connections" and "resources."

After all, Obadiah's work in the past had mostly involved offending people. If one were to speak of his connections, there was probably only people's dislike for him. Even though he had improved somewhat in recent years, the shadow cast by first impressions was not so easily erased.

Thus, the "connections" and "resources" Obadiah possessed were, in essence, mostly the material stored on the computers in his manor.

It would have been fine if those things remained hidden. But once Obadiah used them, the people who had been forced into becoming his "connections" and "resources" would inevitably grow disgusted with him.

They would also inevitably come to see Obadiah as a thorn in their side.

The more Obadiah used his connections, the more enemies he would make. The more enemies he had, the worse his life would become.

For Obadiah, it had practically become a dead end.

But if he did not do so, the FBI would be watching him like hawks. Obadiah could not bear to give up his current life of nightly revelry, much less imagine what he might suffer if he really went inside.

After all, in the United States, "committing suicide" by getting shot seven times in the back was far too common.

Of course, Sherlock had no intention of letting that old bastard Obadiah off so easily. For three whole days, Sherlock barely left his apartment and kept a close watch on how things developed.

Whether on the news or online, whenever someone actually dared to whitewash Obadiah, the videos and documents Obadiah had stored on his computer would go viral across the internet almost instantly.

Without exception, once those people's dirty secrets appeared online, they would turn around and go looking for trouble with Obadiah.

After all, from their perspective, I just helped you, and you stabbed me in the back like this?

Those compromising materials were only in your hands. Only you had them!

What? You said it wasn't you? Then tell me, who else has the exact same dirt that you have?

Obadiah felt terribly wronged, but there was nothing he could do. By now, no matter how stupid he was, he likely understood that the contents of the computers in his manor had been leaked.

The things that had once been Obadiah's lifelines had now become death warrants, forcing him to temporarily abandon the "connections" and "resources" he had accumulated over so many years.

Even now, Obadiah still could not figure out exactly how his secrets had been leaked.

The fear of the unknown, coupled with the increasingly obvious dead end ahead, drove Obadiah to become more and more unhinged.

That behavior began to show in both his work and his personal life.

As the leader of Stark Industries' hardline faction, Obadiah began missing company meetings frequently, allowing the peace faction led by Tony to rapidly swallow up Obadiah's influence within Stark Industries.

After three days, Obadiah had practically been stripped of power by Pepper and Tony working together.

Yet Obadiah himself seemed unconcerned. He spent less and less time appearing at Stark Industries.

So where had Obadiah gone? It was simple: his own weapons factory!

Although Tony had been rescued from the Middle East by Sherlock, the Mark One prototype had still been left behind in the desert.

Obadiah hired members of the Ten Rings to retrieve that wreckage, then began repairing and assembling it in his own contracted factory.

As far as Obadiah was concerned, only one path to survival remained before him.

Kill Tony, inherit Stark Industries, restore the weapons manufacturing division, return to the military-industrial complex, and use its influence to strike a deal with the military so that they could mediate and get him out of this mess.

As for how to kill Tony, that was simple. He could only do it himself. On one hand, he wanted to vent his anger. On the other, no madman at the Continental Hotel or anywhere else would truly accept a contract to assassinate Tony.

What was more, because of Sherlock, the entire Continental Hotel was currently in complete chaos. Even if someone could take the job, they likely could not complete it anytime soon.

So Obadiah could only act personally.

Besides, although Obadiah now looked down on Tony and even hated him, he had never denied Tony's talent. As far as Obadiah was concerned, once the thing that had allowed Tony to escape alive from that hellhole in the Middle East was repaired, using it to kill Tony would be effortless.

What Obadiah could never have imagined, however, was that sometimes the gap between people could be even greater than the gap between a person and a dog.

Nearly every designer capable of working at Obadiah's contracted factory was a genius, but even geniuses could only glimpse Tony's threshold.