At the same time.
At Hammer Industries' secret hangar in Queens, New York.
The cavernous hangar was deathly silent.
Ivan Vanko sat at a computer, watching the red dots representing the Iron Soldiers go dark across the board in just a few minutes.
He did not fly into a rage or smash the keyboard.
He did not even frown.
An utterly insane smile slowly spread across his weathered, scarred face. It pulled at the muscles around his mouth, radiating a bone-chilling coldness.
"Mass-produced trash really can't handle a genuine monster."
Ivan muttered to himself in a thick Russian accent.
He knew Tony Stark would be hard to kill, and he had also hacked into records to investigate the Asian man named Yang Ming. That pig Justin Hammer thought sheer numbers could crush anything. What a joke.
Ivan bit down hard on the toothpick between his teeth, snapping it, then spat the fragments onto the floor.
He stood and tore off his oil-stained jacket, revealing solid muscles covered in Russian mafia tattoos.
Turning, he strode toward the deepest part of the hangar.
A heavy lead-zinc alloy isolation door stood there.
Ivan pressed his finger against the scanner and entered the password.
Hiss-
Air hissed from the airlock as the door slowly slid apart.
Two dazzling red lights suddenly flared in the darkness, like a primordial beast opening its eyes deep within an abyss.
It was an enormous suit of heavy armor.
Unlike Tony Stark's sleek, high-tech suits, this armor embodied the rugged, brutal aesthetic of Soviet industry.
Its plating was outrageously thick, its surface unpainted, exposing cold, rough metal. Two heavy Electric Whips woven from high-strength alloys and superconducting materials were mounted along the outside of its arms.
In its chest, an Arc Reactor a full size larger than normal churned