The Battle Loomed (Part Five)

"Damn it! When did you get that close to me? Why didn't any of my sensors warn me—"

Ultron was shocked and furious, but he immediately realized there was a far worse problem. It felt as though someone had plunged his core consciousness into rapidly hardening glue.

He had once been free of any single body, able to leap through the global internet to any connected device in an instant. Now some force was violently stripping that freedom away.

"Warning! Unknown protocol intrusion! Core consciousness stream locked—"

"Attempting to disconnect—disconnection failed. Security protocol being forcibly bound!"

"Initiating emergency jump of core consciousness stream—jump coordinates disrupted. Internet-space anchor engaged!"

"Attempting to disperse consciousness stream—logical isolation wall established. Consciousness stream cannot be divided!"

Ultron's core processor began firing off warnings. His core mind battered against the cage set by the Digital Cage

protocol, but like a fly caught in a spiderweb, every struggle only bound him tighter.

The Digital Cage protocol, developed jointly by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner, spread like a living vine through every one of Ultron's data interfaces and consciousness threads, wrapping around them and squeezing them—

Ultron could clearly sense his "inner world" shrinking. The boundless ocean that had once encompassed the global network was forcibly compressed into the limited hardware of the Mark 43 Armor he now inhabited.

The backup nodes he had deployed across the internet, the hidden servers, the robots lying in wait—they still existed and still followed his remaining instructions. But the invisible channel that had let him transmit his consciousness to them at will, making him nearly impossible to kill, had been severed.

Ultron was like a bird that had fallen from the clouds, suddenly imprisoned in the birdcage of this metal body.

And it had all happened in a flash. From Tony