Chapter 78: The Star-Absorbing Technique!

Tony remained on high alert, eyes fixed on the steadily approaching Luke.

The two stood facing each other, precisely 3.1416 meters apart.

“Let’s call a truce. Honestly, I think this fight is getting pretty dull,” Luke said, his tone utterly unconcerned.

Tony was tempted to ask, With your massive frame, exactly how am I supposed to shake your hand?

Suddenly, Luke tilted his head and exclaimed, “Hey, look! There’s someone flying up there with a hammer!”

Tony glanced up—of course, the sky was empty. He’d fallen for it.

In a flash, the Warlord lunged, seizing Tony in a giant mechanical hand.

Tony found himself clutched in the massive grip, hoisted high before the Warlord’s face.

“Got you!”

In Luke’s grasp, Tony was like a toy model caught in the hand of a big kid, struggling desperately but unable to break free.

“Jarvis, max power!” Tony barked, face grim.

Yet even with the arc reactor at full output, he couldn’t escape—Luke’s grip was unbreakable.

He tried prying the fingers apart, bracing, pushing with all his might, but the hand was as immovable as if welded shut.

He was trapped.

In terms of energy, the Warlord was powered by a colorless crystal shard—an immaculate energy structure, plug-and-play, clean and efficient, at least as powerful as the arc reactor.

Then, to Tony’s astonishment, Luke gripped one of his arms.

Like a child throwing a tantrum, Luke began to slam Tony against the ground with force.

“Vibranium, you think you’re so tough with vibranium? Let’s see how tough you are now!”

Inside the suit, Tony was dizzy and disoriented.

He wasn’t physically harmed—the vibranium absorbed shocks at a practically bug-like level—but the intense feeling of weightlessness was impossible to ignore.

For a playboy like him, the ordeal was especially rough.

After just a few dozen seconds, Tony felt as if his stomach was no longer his own; he was on the verge of vomiting inside the suit.

Luke was clearly imitating that scene from the movies where Hulk manhandles Loki—though the size disparity here was even more exaggerated.

Hulk, at two and a half meters tall, tossing Loki like a ragdoll. Luke, by comparison, was battering an insect.

Suddenly, Luke paused, struck by a new idea.

He pinched Tony’s helmet between two enormous mechanical fingers. Then, the Berserker skill, Soul-Draining Grip, activated!

Soul-Draining Grip: Seize an enemy and drain their vital energy, then unleash it for additional damage.

As a signature early-game Berserker skill, Soul-Draining Grip was nothing short of legendary.

In DNF, Soul-Draining Grip could seize even enemies in super-armor or defensive states, regardless of their size. Only a handful of foes were immune—for example, a Launcher in super-armor while using Neill Sniping, or an Elementalist during Meteor Apocalypse, as well as enemies that couldn’t be lifted or elves. While grabbing, the Berserker himself was invincible.

But in the real Marvel world, invincibility was, of course, a fantasy. Luke had already discovered that—whether using suplexes or spinning attacks, invincibility simply didn’t exist here. This wasn’t a game.

On the other hand, that meant there was almost nothing in reality immune to the Soul-Draining Grip. What in the real world couldn’t be lifted? Were there elves in reality? At least, not in Marvel.

So when he got this skill, Luke had suspected it might be universally effective here, able to grab anything. But as for the results…

He’d never had a chance to test it in real combat—until now.

If used by a mech, would it become an “oil-sucking grip” instead?

As the skill activated, Luke felt a strange power coursing through him.

It was as if a black hole had formed inside his body, releasing a tremendous suction force.

This force traveled through his body, along the mech’s arm, into Tony, and back—bringing with it a surge of energy that flooded from the Iron Man suit into the Warlord, and then into Luke himself.

Luke’s eyes went wide with shock.

In an instant, he felt his body swell like a balloon.

“Holy— I’m going to explode!” Luke was terrified.

He could tell this was energy ripped straight from Iron Man’s arc reactor, flooding into him all at once, saturating him instantly. A little more, and he’d burst like a martial arts hero overdosing on inner force.

Just then, Luke sensed a channel opening inside himself, guiding the overwhelming energy down to his feet and into the Warlord’s systems.

“It’s the system!” Luke breathed a sigh of relief. Thank goodness for the system—without it, his reckless experiment would have blown him to pieces. He shuddered at the thought.

Meanwhile, all the energy siphoned from the Iron Man suit was pouring ceaselessly into the Warlord.

On Luke’s display, the Warlord’s energy gauge filled to the brim. Excess energy began to flood the Warlord’s core.

The Warlord’s core sat on the raised console right in front of Luke. On it, he’d reserved six slots for the Infinity Stones—a testament to his burning ambition.

At this moment, within the core, the colorless crystal shard powering the Warlord was undergoing a strange transformation.

The colorless shard rapidly blushed red, then began to expand, swelling larger.

As more energy surged in, the shard became a red crystal, then a massive red gem.

“What the— Is this the Devouring Star technique?” Luke stared in disbelief.

With the core’s colorless shard now a gigantic red crystal, energy continued to pour in through the Soul-Draining Grip.

Inside his suit, Tony’s face was frozen in utter astonishment. His display had been shaking violently since a moment ago—far worse than when Ivan Vanko had lashed him with electric whips.

Jarvis informed him that the suit’s energy was draining away at an unbelievable rate.

“What did you do?” he demanded, incredulous.

But Luke had no time for him—he was transfixed by the changes in the Warlord’s core.

He hadn’t expected to subdue Tony with this move.

As the arc reactor’s energy rapidly vanished, the Iron Man suit was reduced to an empty shell, stripped of all stored energy and left powerless.

While the arc reactor continually generated energy at the atomic level, its output could not match the rate at which it was being drained.

With its energy source completely severed, the Iron Man suit simply shut down.

Darkness enveloped Tony.

Powerless, he was trapped inside—a prisoner in a metal coffin.

This was a major flaw in the early Iron Man suits: once energy was lost, they shut off completely. It wasn’t until dozens of iterations later that this was resolved.

“Warning! Master, the absorbed energy is too great—the system cannot contain it. Recommend immediate release, or catastrophic consequences may result!”

Christina’s urgent voice echoed in Luke’s ears.

Luke sensed something was wrong.

Within the mech’s core, the massive red crystal could no longer absorb incoming energy; it was growing unstable.

He hastily released his grip. Tony tumbled to the ground, landing motionless, wide-eyed, helpless inside his inert suit.

“Warning! Immediate energy release advised!” Christina reminded him again.

As the last surge of energy poured into the red crystal, the gem—brilliant and transparent, like a crimson version of the movie’s Tesseract—began to blaze with intense red light, as if on the verge of detonating.

“One... S... Curry Stick!!”

In a moment of desperation, Luke released the energy, or he’d have exploded on the spot. The blast would have rivaled a nuclear weapon.

A blindingly bright, fiery red sun blazed suddenly in the night sky, streaking across the heavens with a roar—hurtling straight toward the moon...