Pepper Potts was not one to worry. As an employee and close friend of Tony Stark, she was well acquainted with the anxiety of being able to do nothing while a loved one was in mortal danger. Tony Stark, after all, moonlighted as the invincible Iron Man, a modern day knight in red and gold armor that always stayed two steps ahead of the state-of-the-art. As Iron Man, Tony had faced down death hundreds of times, and as an associate of his, Pepper had lived her share of danger as well. She didn't let it worry her anymore.

But Pepper Potts was worried now.

Somewhere over the Sea of Japan, Iron Man was racing a dozen ICBMs for the Japanese shoreline. The entire breadth of the Sea would be barely a handful of steps to an intercontinental ballistic missile. Iron Man had, understandably, cut off communication with Pepper in his race to catch them. She was currently trying to get in touch with someone, anyone, in Japan in a position of power, someone who might believe an American secretary's warning of impending doom. She wasn't having any luck.

She kept trying. And told herself in the meantime that her friend would know what to do. Tony always knew what to do.

What the hell am I going to do?

On the other side of the world, a lone armored man clung to the side of a gamma bomb as it hurtled across the sea. The man in the armor, Tony Stark, had helped design the rocket he was currently riding, and he now found himself in the unenviable position of trying to find a weakness in a design he had thought perfect. He had been trying for minutes to break into the guidance system of the rocket he was riding, but he'd designed it to only allow incoming transmissions on a very specific, narrow bandwidth, and he was having no luck finding the correct setting. He'd managed to scramble the guidance systems of a flock of ICBMs a few years back,* but he'd had a lot more time to prepare and more specialized equipment handy then. Now he only had what the armor normally carried, and while that made for a fairly extensive toolbox, he was beginning to fear it wouldn't be enough.

(* In Marvel's Iron Man vol. 1 #277 - Russ)

On the horizon, he could see the big island of Japan. The other eleven missiles he was accompanying were lined up to either side of him, ready to rain radioactive death on an unsuspecting and undeserving populace. Years ago, a scientist named Bruce Banner had been caught in the blast of a prototype gamma bomb, and the peculiar radiation had turned him into the single most destructive force on this planet: the Incredible Hulk. Gamma radiation had created other monsters over the years-the hyper-intelligent Leader, the brutish Abomination-and there was no reason for Tony to believe that it wouldn't do the same to a portion of Japan's population. The bombs were spread out sufficiently that there would probably be no part of Japan's island chain left unaffected by the blasts. If only he could--

Tony paused, turning his helmet to the left and the right. The rockets were lined up at set intervals in the sky on either side of him, never varying their distance in relation to each other.

Of course! The rockets had to have a way of communicating with each other so they wouldn't collide in mid-air. That meant they all had transmitters in addition to the receivers he'd designed, and that meant...

Tony punched a hand through the hull of the rocket and rooted around until he found the source of a subtle radio signal he hadn't bothered to look for before. He ripped the transmitter out of the shell, wires and connectors trailing behind it into the guts of the missile, and considered it for a moment.

"This'll do it," he muttered. He might be able to control the other rockets with this. 'Might' was the operative word, of course, but he'd performed a miracle or two in his day. What was one more?

That left one thing to do before he abandoned his steed. He opened a passive sensor array and searched for a specific high-band radiation. Once he'd located it, closer to the cone of the rocket's head, he crawled up the length of the missile and, with his free hand, used his mechanical muscle to rip another hole in the missile's shell. Without half of its radio set, the missile was beginning to waver off-course and he had to waste half a second steadying himself on top of it.

Tony Stark, billionaire boy inventor, knew a thing or two about bombs. It took him only a moment to find the detonator charge next to the gamma core. He removed it carefully and chucked it over the side of the missile. Then, being very careful not to accidentally detonate it himself, he placed a hand on the lead containment cell for the gamma core, and used a low power repulsor blast to melt it. Working quickly but carefully, he shaped the containment cell into a seamless egg of lead from which no radiation could escape.

He looked up. Japan's shoreline was noticeably closer. Not much time left. Kicking off of the rocket, he fired his boot jets. The Iron Man armor was capable of keeping up with and even outpacing a flock of ICBMs, so he no longer needed to cleave to the rocket now that he had a plan. Turning, he tucked the transmitter under one arm and fired a two-handed repulsor blast into the end of the missile he'd been riding. The missile lurched wildly. A second repulsor blast detonated the fuel tanks in the bottom of the rocket. The explosion ripped the bottom half of the missile apart and sent the remainder corkscrewing into the sea below, no longer a danger to anyone with its detonator removed and it's gamma core properly shielded. Iron Man wasted no time watching it fall. Instead, he rolled in the air and fired himself at full speed toward the Japanese coast.

"How strong do you think you are?" the little girl asked.

Johnny Ko had no answer, and indeed, he knew he needn't give one. As real as the girl looked facing him where he sat slumped against the metal wall, he knew he could wave a hand through the space her small form was occupying and encounter no resistance. She was an hallucination, caused by the enormous pool of blood he was sitting in and the twin holes in his chest that blood had escaped through. Johnny Ko was dying, and the little girl-she couldn't have been more than eight-was just a construct of his blood-starved brain.

Over the girl's head, Johnny could make out the Hydra control center that had just fired a dozen ICBMs at Japan. Standing in the center of the room were the orchestraters of this atrocity, two people Johnny loved more than anyone in the world. One was his father, Ko Yung Kil, the elderly Korean/Japanese man who had put a bullet through Johnny's chest and left him for dead. The other was his sister, Meiko Ko, decked out in a startlingly tight, green sleeveless unitard and tall heels. On one of his trips into and out of unconsciousness, Johnny had heard his father refer to Meiko as "Madame Hydra". The significance of this escaped him, along with another spurt of blood from the exit wound in his back.

"Do you think you've got it in you to hang on a little while longer?" the little girl asked.

"As long as you need," Johnny muttered-or tried to mutter. No one turned in his direction, so he must have just imagined he'd said it. That was fine. The little girl had heard, and she acknowledged it with a nod.

"As long as you need."

"Not long now, father."

Ko Yung Kil considered his daughter, standing to his right in the garb of the station she coveted. For not the first time that day he wondered if he would have any of his soul left to call his own when this was over. He shook that off. The time for doubts was long past, after all. If he thought otherwise, a look behind him at his dying son would make it clear for him again.

But he didn't want to look back at Johnny now. Instead he eyed Johnny's sister. "When this is over, you gain the rank of Madame Hydra, correct?"

Meiko glanced down at him with something he recognized as disdain. "Yes, father, we've been through this countless times: you help Hydra annihilate Japan, exacting your revenge on the Japanese people, then returning to your life as it was before. Hydra takes credit for this ultimate act of terrorism, and-as the architect of the entire scheme-I earn the rank of Madame Hydra." She returned her gaze to the screens. "I'm curious as to why you felt it necessary to shoot Johnny, though. We've gone to considerable lengths to connect him to Hydra and frame him for this once it's all over. I knew he would have to be silenced, but I wouldn't have thought you would take that matter into your own hands."

"Yes, well, as you said, it needed to be done." Ko Yung Kil resisted the temptation to look behind him at his son. Was Johnny dead yet? He had no idea, and he couldn't bring himself to check.

"Madame Hydra!" a Hydra technician called from his post on one of the control center's catwalks. Though she hadn't officially earned the rank yet, she had commanded this post for its entire existence, and those Hydra agents stationed here treated her with the proper respect. "Milady, one of the missiles has dropped off the screen!"

On the large monitor in the center of the room, where twelve red lines had previously tracked the progress of the missiles from the coast of South Korea, there were now eleven. Meiko glanced at her father. "How is that possible?"

On the screen, a smaller red line appeared, outdistancing the remaining rockets, but following their projected path to Japan. "What is that?" Meiko Ko growled, knowing the answer to her question even as she voiced it.

"Whatever it is, it's smaller and faster than the other rockets, ma'am... uh, aren't Tony Stark and his bodyguard in South Korea, Madame?"

"Damn him!" Meiko cried. She stormed over to the console. "It's Iron Man, isn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am, I believe so."

Meiko Ko sent up a primal cry of rage, the likes of which her father wouldn't have believed could issue from human lips, much less his own daughter's. "He will not tamper with those missiles! I want every flying unit we have scrambled. Blast him out of the sky, do whatever it takes-"

"Madame, with all due respect, we have nothing that could possibly catch up to those rockets, and Iron Man is flying even faster."

The technician cowered beneath Meiko's glare. For a moment, it seemed she would kill the messenger, which seemed to be a favored method of dealing with bad news in the commanding ranks of Hydra, Ko Yung-Kil thought, but then her father's calm voice cut through the danger hanging in the air around the woman.

"Meiko. What will this Iron Man do? From what I know of him, he may have the power to knock the missiles off course, but does he have the time? I think not."

"He could somehow take control of them...."

"I doubt it. We are, after all, dealing with the bodyguard here and not Tony Stark himself. I'm sure, whoever he is, he hasn't the technical expertise to discover the proper bandwidth or to crack our codes. Now calm yourself. Eleven gamma bombs will destroy Japan as surely as twelve, and there's nothing to be gained from a temper tantrum."

Meiko considered this logic for a moment, then turned and strode back to where her father was standing. "Never talk to me that way in front of my men, father!" she hissed as she turned to face the screens again.

"I'll do as I please, young woman. I'm far too old to do otherwise. Now stand here with me and watch. It's all we can do, now."

Iron Man touched down on a heavily populated beach on the Japanese coast and ignored the surprised swimmers and lifeguards as he turned to face the western sky.

"Pepper," he said, "I need a direct patch into the house's Crays. I'm going to need more processing speed than the armor's got.

"You got it, Tony." There was no peevishness in Pepper's voice from the way Tony had turned her off minutes earlier. She was a professional, was Miss Potts. As her employer, Tony never had reason to doubt that.

He jacked into the transmitter he was still carrying while the line of missiles continued to grow in the sky, and beachcombers -- possibly more sensitive to the possibility of objects falling from the sky after the armored Avenger's arrival -- began to take notice. Slowly at first, then gaining a speed just below that of panic, the crowds began to vacate the beach. Iron Man worked on without noticing.

"Do you have that patch ready yet, Pep? We're running out of time here."

"It's ready, boss. Tony... where are you?"

"On the beach." He laughed at the tranquil images that phrase brought to mind.

"In Japan??"

"Yes, it's the perfect vantage point."

"But if you fail-"

"Then I'm toast too, but don't worry Pep. I do my best work under pressure. Thanks for the patch."

He turned off his voice receiver again and returned his attention to the radio bundle in his hands. The bandwidth he needed was right there in the simple chip that controlled the unit. He could talk to the missiles now, but he had no idea how to say it in a language they would understand. That's what the patch to the supercomputers in his Seattle home was for. They were currently the only chance he had of breaking those codes.

As the man stood under the threat of radioactive death, the machine began running code at twelve million variations per second. Iron Man hoped it would be enough.

"Cowards!"

"Be quiet, Johnny! Oh please be quiet, don't let them know you're still-"

"You heard me," Johnny coughed and a wet, wheezing sound came from the hole in his chest. "Cowards, you're all-"

"Really, father, couldn't you have finished the job?" Meiko asked.

"I did my part, girl. If you want him dead, do it yourself."

"You would do well to speak to me in a more respectful tone, father."

And you would do well to call me 'father' without that sneer on your lips."

"You-you're the biggest coward of all, Ko Yung Kil!" Johnny shouted. Beside him, the phantom girl stopped pleading with him to remain silent, but kept the same fretful look on her phantom face. "You haven't the heart to finish me, because you know you're finished then too. What's left of the man I called father? What's-?" Johnny coughed again, and a machete of pain buried itself in his side. "You've hidden from your convictions all your life. You're a fraud, and I'm glad I'm dying! I could never be proud as the son of such a base liar! That's what you are, old man! A liar and a bastard!"

Turning, the older man stomped back to wear Johnny sat against the wall, leaning on his cane as he went. Johnny heard Meiko laugh, but his attention was already divided between the pain and his approaching father, so he tuned her out. His father was standing over him a moment later, the gun he'd had inside his jacket back in his hand and pointed at his son's head.

"You're as bad as the Japanese ever were, 'father,'" Johnny coughed, putting the same sneer into the word as Meiko had. "Obliterating a defenseless enemy. Is that what you want your legacy to be, old man?"

"You -- you and your sister are petulant children, who will never understand or appreciate the blessing you received when you were born in this generation. Do you hear me? Children!"

"Bastard!" Johnny returned weakly.

"Oh Johnny, no..." the little girl implored him.

The older man ratcheted the chamber on his pistol back, and leaned closer to his son.

"You'll never understand why I do this, Johnny. You'll never--"

With nearly every bit of strength and speed he had left, Johnny Ko lifted his foot and kicked out violently against his father's left knee. There was a wet pop, and the knee, severely weakened from a childhood injury, twisted into a new shape and dropped the old man practically in Johnny's lap. The gun clattered to the floor on Johnny's left and, finding just a little more strength in his body, he plucked it up in trembling fingers as his father began to howl in agony.

"Johnny-!" the little girl cried.

"Come on..." Tony Stark urged. The missiles were little more than five miles off the beach now. If they had been coming from anywhere else besides the Korean peninsula, there would have been time for Japan's anti-air artillery to blast them out of the sky. But Korea was too close. There was no time. It was up to him.

Inside the helmet, he watched the numbers representing the cryptologic sequence his supercomputers were running flash by. He had seconds at best.

Johnny swung the gun around. People were starting to take notice of him: Hydra agents first turning toward his father's howling, then beginning to level their own weapons in his direction. He didn't care. He couldn't do anything for the Japanese and he was a dead man, but he was going to take one person with him. Just one.

He saw the eyes of the little girl-the phantom who had been pleading with him since he'd awakened on this floor with a bullet hole in his chest-grow huge in fear as he pointed the gun at her temple.

"No, Johnny! Please, I love-"

Johnny Ko pulled the trigger.

"I'm not going to make it," Iron Man whispered, staring vainly at the numbers flashing by as the missiles closed in.

The gun in Johnny's hand exploded, firing a bullet through the forehead of the phantom girl... and across the room into Meiko Ko's very tangible skull. Her brother didn't see the spray of blood from her head, as the recoil slammed him back against the wall on his wounded side. The world went gray for a long moment, but Johnny heard the explosions of other weapons just before a rain of metal tore through him, ripping what was left of his life away.

"Yeah! Go, go!" Iron Man cried as the line of missiles suddenly peeled out of their descent and formed up in a line again, this time headed straight up. He watched them for several moments until they were lost in the sun, then slumped back into a sitting position on the beach, blowing up a drift of sand on all four sides with the impact.

"Tony?"

"Yeah Pep, I'm here."

"Everything's all right then?"

"Oh yeah, peachy."

"How'd you stop them?"

Iron Man considered the transceiver in his hand, then pulled the jack out and tossed the radio nonchalantly into the sand. "Convinced the rest of the missiles that the entire Japanese island chain was actually the missile I took the transceiver from. Their guidance systems keep them from colliding, so they veered off at the last second..." he sighed expansively, "... and I do mean the last second. Then I told them Japan was really located in the Sea of Tranquility."

"The moon?"

"Yep, they'll run out of fuel before they get out of earth's orbit, though. I can gather them up later." With a groan, he pushed himself to his feet again. "Right now I intend to do everything in my power to make sure Hydra doesn't get away with this."

"I've contacted the South Korean military. It took some time to cross the language barrier, but they should have a special ops unit out to that mountain you said the missiles came from within the hour."

"I'll beat them there."

And with that, the golden Avenger fired himself into the sky again, retracing the route he'd just taken across the sea.

"Maaaadaaaaammmmee Hyyyydraaaa..."

Meiko Ko opened bleary eyes and looked into the face of a Hydra operative. She should have known his name, she thought, but the ringing in her skull made it hard to focus, made the noise of the alarm klaxons and fleeing footfalls stretch out as if the world's soundtrack was a tape playing at the wrong speed.

The operative was telling her she had to go, had to leave to fight another day. He was ushering her across the floor, though she couldn't remember standing up from where he'd found her. The left side of her face felt... floppy, as if it wasn't strapped onto her skull as tightly as it should have been. Something sticky and salty coated that side of her face too, and when she put up a hand to wipe at it, her guide gently restrained her from doing so. She nearly tripped over a body as she stumbled past, and was mildly surprised to see it was her own father's bullet-riddled corpse, laying alongside her brother's.

She looked at her guide. He was young, barely old enough to drink in this country. In his eyes, though, was the hardened determination of a soldier not about to leave his commander to die in the field.

"Help me...," Meiko said.

Then her world went black.

When the South Korean military did arrive at Hydra's mountain stronghold, their reconnaissance revealed a facility strangely resembling a ghost town. Tentatively, scouts crept through the deserted, steel corridors, ever attentive to danger but consistently finding none. Finally, one two-man team located some bodies scattered about one hall, all clad in Hydra's trademark green regalia. There were scorch marks on the walls, as if from blaster fire. All of the agents were alive, and some were even beginning to revive when they were discovered, but all would be looking at hospital stays before they were brought in front of any court for their crimes.

More probing into the complex revealed the control center, which was populated by literal piles of unconscious Hydra agents, many looking as if they'd simply been tossed in there after being rendered insensate. There were three people in this room not clad in the standard Hydra fair. One was an elderly man that one of the soldiers recognized as the famous industrialist Ko Yung Kil. Beside him was a younger man. Both had apparently been torn apart by the same hail of gunfire. Standing in the center of the room was 7 feet of gold and scarlet metal that everyone present knew immediately as the American Avenger known as Iron Man.

"Gentlemen," he said to the soldiers as they lowered their weapons, "they're all yours."

And with that, fire spewed from his boots and he rocketed up through the gaping hole in the rock ceiling of the chamber.

"So Johnny Ko wasn't responsible for what happened?"

"No. I got one of the Hydra agents to talk before the Korean army arrived. Johnny was going to take the fall for his father and sister. Meiko--who got away, by the way; I couldn't find her anywhere in the complex--had ambitions of advancing in Hydra. Put her on the list of romantic interests turned evil. Apparently her and Johnny's father, Ko Yung Kil, had some reason to hate the Japanese, but I doubt we'll ever know what that reason was now."

Pepper paused. Her friend's voice came in loud and clear on the receiver. She could see him in her mind's eye soaring across the Korean sky. Power and grace all in one iron bundle.

"What about you? Are you all right?"

"I liked Johnny a lot, Pep... and now I'm going to have to live with the fact that the last words I spoke to him were groundless, angry accusations. I'm not all right. I'm not sure I will be for a while."

"Then come home, Tony. We miss you."

"Yeah," Tony Stark agreed. Then there was a click as he turned off his transmitter, and Pepper Potts was left alone with her thoughts.

"Johnny, wake up!"

Johnny Ko opened his eyes. He was still in the corridor leading into the Hydra control center, he saw, but the entire facility was empty. No Hydra agents. No movement of any kind. Upon further inspection, he found the wall behind him was unmarked by gunfire and the floor beneath him was unstained by his blood. In fact, the entire room, the very walls, seemed to exude a warm, peaceful cleanliness, a comforting light.

"Finally! I thought you'd never get here!"

Johnny turned and looked into the eyes of the little girl he'd seen in his blood-starved dementia. She held her hands behind her back and smiled at him, rocking back on her heels shyly as she did so. He returned the smile and put out a hand. She took it.

"You're ready then?" she asked.

"Yes."

He stood and strode hand-in-hand with his beautiful sister Meiko-as she had looked long before whatever had twisted her inside had sunk its claws into her-into the control center proper. There was a door of light waiting there for them, and its calm radiance reminded him of nothing so much as the sunrise over the ocean. Johnny Ko couldn't think of a better image of peace.

Grasping the hand of his older-now younger-sister, Johnny Ko stepped into the dawn.

Next Issue: A change of pace, as Iron Man races to save an old friend and places himself on a collision course with the Master of the World (remember him?). Be here for Part 1 of Sea Monsters!