Three Things

"Ah, now I remember!" Tony pretended to have a sudden realization. "So that means you can travel to other worlds too?"

"Mm, that's right." Leon directly ignored the old man's act. The guy had simply forgotten.

"My God, you really are a little genius. The theory of parallel worlds—or alternate worlds—has just been proven by you!"

Tony gasped theatrically, then turned sincere and earnest. "When you travel between worlds, you have to let me experience it at least once!"

"And! If you're going to look for Kryptonite, you have to take me with you!"

Knowing he could no longer persuade Leon, Tony simply chose to join in. "At least when Kryptonite turns you into an ordinary person, I can take the chance to kick you a couple of times."

Leon had already grown used to this kind of awkward concern. After thinking for a moment, he did not refuse outright. "We'll talk about it when the time comes."

"Alright, enough about pursuing power for now!"

Seeing that Tony still wanted to say something, he changed the subject. "Let's head back inside first. We still need to talk about those things I mentioned before—the things I've wanted to do for a long time!"

Half an hour later.

Leon and Tony sat around the workbench in the lab.

Tony was wearing a bathrobe. As he listened to Leon, his expression gradually became more solemn.

"There are only three things I want to do now that I'm back."

Leon raised a finger, as though he were asking Tony to help him take three lives.

"The first is dealing with Obadiah."

"That target has already been dealt with. I kept telling you there was something wrong with him, and this proved it."

"The second is dealing with Ten Rings! They kidnapped you, so I'll help you wipe them out! I'll start tomorrow."

"The third is investigating the truth behind our parents' deaths!"

The first two had been fine, but Tony could no longer sit still when Leon mentioned the third. "The truth? What truth? Didn't they die in a car accident?"

Leon could not directly say that he already knew the killer was the Winter Soldier, Bucky.

There was no basis for it, and he had no evidence to produce.

Besides, his target was not merely Bucky.

Only Hydra as a whole was worthy of making him show his strength.

"I've always had my doubts." Leon clasped his hands together beneath his chin, looking deeply contemplative.

"If it really was a car accident, why did I, the most fragile one, survive while they died?"

"Leon, that was because the car caught fire and they couldn't get out. You were thrown from the car, and the baby wrap was wound around your neck twice." Tony's thinking was unexpectedly clear at that moment.

Yet deep down, he had a faint urge to believe everything Leon said immediately.

Perhaps he had been waiting a very long time for someone to tell him, "Your parents' deaths were not an accident."

Eighteen years ago, when the couple died, he had been out of town, still at odds with Howard.

When he received the news of their deaths, he had even thought that he could go back to Los Angeles after a while. The old man's face at home was simply too irritating.

It was not until someone handed him that sheet of paper bearing the death notification

that he realized some things had left forever.

How badly he had wanted to vent. He held endless anger toward himself, even anger toward that notice of death.

Over the years, Tony had accepted the fact that his parents were dead, and he had also developed the strange habit of never taking anything from another person's hand.

But deep in his heart, perhaps he had always longed for someone to tell him

—his parents' deaths had not been an accident.

Then perhaps he could rightfully seek out the killer and take revenge.

All the anger toward his former self hidden beneath the playboy facade could finally be released as well.

But the more he wanted that, the more Tony understood that he had to investigate everything thoroughly and could not implicate innocent people.

In that cave in Afghanistan, he had learned more than how to build armor. He had also learned respect for life.

"That's how it looked on the surface, but there's another possibility!"

Leon stared into Tony's eyes. "That baby, Ben, was originally supposed to die too. The cloth around his neck should have taken his life long ago, but the killer who left after staging the accident didn't know that Kryptonian Bloodline lay dormant in the baby's body!"

Leon had once been unable to understand why he had survived that accident.

The controlled Winter Soldier could not possibly have had any notion of sparing the old or protecting the young, unless he had made a mistake.

But how could such a killing machine possibly make a mistake?

It was not until Leon awakened his Kryptonian Bloodline that he realized it had not been a mistake by the Winter Soldier that saved him, but the bloodline hidden inside him.

Though it had not awakened yet, it had still granted him greater vitality, allowing him to survive that disaster.

Leon's words struck through Tony's mind like lightning.

"Y-you mean..." His mind was rumbling.

Leon did not care about Tony's loss of composure and continued, "When I was little, I also thought this guess came from nowhere."

"Everyone's assessments clearly agreed that it had been an accident, so why was I making baseless assumptions?"

"But after awakening my abilities, I knew that guess might have been right. It was the truth my subconscious had already decided upon!"

"Those memories from the accident might not have been retained by my immature brain at the time, but they still left traces in my subconscious."

That part was the truth.

After awakening Super-Brain, Leon had gained some hazy impressions of things from before he was one year old, though they were not clear.

Human memory was a very strange thing. The brain relied on neurons transmitting impulses, thereby imprinting scenes into its memory-storage regions.

Before the age of one, Leon's brain had been extremely immature, and his neurons had not fully developed, making it impossible to imprint complete memories.

So even after awakening Super-Brain, he could not recover memories that Ben had never had in the first place. At most, vague scenes and images would flicker through his mind.

But that was only the explanation from a physical perspective.

In a world like Marvel, where mysterious powers existed,

perhaps tomorrow, or perhaps someday in the future, Leon would be able to recover all his memories from before he was one.

Leon's tone suddenly changed. "In the days since I came back, I haven't stopped investigating this... I've already found the truth, Tony!"

"You're telling the truth!?" Tony sprang to his feet. His pupils gradually widened, revealing shock and anger.

Leon's tone remained unchanged. "My Super Hearing found them! The killers were their people!"

"Who are they!?" Tony already believed him, and his voice was cold as a blade.

"Hydra!" Leon finally gave him the answer.

"Impossible! Hydra has already perished. That was the final chapter of history!" Tony instinctively questioned it.

He completely believed Leon, but he still found it impossible to accept.

"They did perish, but only temporarily. Cut off one head of Hydra and two more grow back. They've already 'come back to life'!"

Leon spoiled it outright. "Over the past few days, I investigated classified records from many secret agencies."

"And I discovered that behind the world's major international official organizations"

"there was a secret organization unknown to the public, one that answered to the International Security Council."

"They were called the Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. I call them S.H.I.E.L.D. for short, and their headquarters are in New York."

"The predecessor of this organization was the Strategic Scientific Reserve, founded by our dad and others."

"During Operation Paperclip after World War II, they absorbed some of the talent left behind in Germany after Hydra's fall."

"And those people never lost their loyalty to Hydra!"

Tony could already guess what came next. "So those people later latched onto S.H.I.E.L.D. and brought Hydra back to life?"

Leon nodded. "That's right. Hydra wanted to assassinate our dad because they wanted to infiltrate S.H.I.E.L.D., and Dad was one of S.H.I.E.L.D.'s leaders. He was in their way!"

Tony slowly sat back down. He pressed his lips together. "How many Hydra people are in S.H.I.E.L.D. now? Does the director know?"

The next second, Leon's words made him immediately stand again:

"S.H.I.E.L.D. has over ten thousand people. The vast majority are Hydra. The former director was Hydra too. The current director isn't, but he's even more Hydra than Hydra."

"What?" Tony cried out. "So this organization basically belongs to Hydra?"