20 [ Iris ] Battle Royal

  So Victor Von Doom the second had decided to throw down with me over who was the rightful heir, and despite looking like cracked peach colored rock, Junior’s skin turned out to have a lot of give to it.

  So did his bones which I found out as I buried my fist halfway into his skull as everything just gave away underneath my knuckles.

  I was probably from having him copying Mr Fantastic powers. It was like trying to punch mud.

  Another effect of Mr Fs powers was that punching Vic’s skull so hard it deformed his brain didn’t hurt him at all, in fact, it didn’t even slow him down as he returned my punch with a full slam into my chest that lifted me off my feet and send me flying back.

  I’m strong enough to lift over a hundred tons but I do still only weigh in at a petite six hundred or so pounds, so unless I got something to grab a hold of, any reasonable super strong punch is going to knock me flying.

  So as I flew across the room and lifted my knees up towards my chest, I grinned and kicked back against the wall behind me with enough force to crack the stone and leaped back at my eldest brother, with both of my hands out the grab and twist into his pliant flesh. “Hulk Grasp!”

  Vic’s eyes went wide just before he vanished from in front of me, gone invisible again, but I still managed to snag a hold of one of his shoulders and dug in.

  “Unhand me woman!”

  I took another punch to the face with an enlarged block like flaming fist as he tried to knock me free, but I wasn’t letting go. “Hey! Ow! How does that work? Can you only use so much of each of the powers at once? And don’t call me woman, rude, we’re family!”

  Grabbing a hold of the arm he was trying to knock me away with, I began to wind it multiple times around my arm as I pulled his other shoulder out like taffy. “If I force you to use your stretching… Stop kicking! Will that keep you from using your other powers?”

  Then he stretched his stone skin into a bunch of even more stone like spikes on the arm I had wrapped around mine and squeezed the coils tight.

  “Ow!” I whipped him across the room and through a wall before I checked my arm, he hadn't even broken the skin, but it had still hurt. Looking around I couldn't see him anywhere. “Hey, don’t tell me you’re running away from a little girl?”

  I saw the chunk of masonry he had turned invisible and had swung at the end of an unseen stretched out arm just before he finished whipping it around and smashed me in the face with it. The stone shattered as it flipped me head over heels nearly into full mid air spin before I slammed face first into the ground.

  Growling, I raised my head to see him stalking out of the shadows, pulling a green tee shirt on over his head. He had also found a set of gray sweatpants.

  “You are nearly a woman grown and a Von Doom. I will not allow anyone, even you, to demean our family by calling you a mere little girl.”

  Enlarging and clenching shut both of his fists as spikes emerged from his knuckles, he glared down at me. “Now yield to the better Doom!”

  I grinned, “Awwww, Vic. You do see me as family.” Slapping my hand down, I threw myself upward to my feet and then rushed him.

  “Don’t call me…” I took us through a wall before he could finish, and into the dressing room he must have gotten the clothing from. It including a set of fabrication machines as well as a set of matching male and female mannequins modeling a formal suit and the other a gown… and a display case with a golden crown resting on a green velvet pillow.

  Ooooo… I lifted a struggling Junior up by the neck. “I’m going to want to come back here, so let’s take the fight off… that way.”

  And with that, I ran my brother through a door, then the opposite wall. Through some kind of old lab, out another wall, and finally into a load bearing stone support, where I pulled him back out of the Vic Jr shaped impression and rammed him back into it twice more before he got an arm wrapped around my neck and managed to cut off my breath.

  “I have you now wo… Sister.”

  Great, finally a man that listens, and I’m related to him… and also throwing down with.

  I panicked a little over getting my throat squeezed shut and that gave him the chance to get a few hits in, until I realized I wasn’t blacking out or anything.

  Do Hulks not need to breathe? Just what all can I survive now?

  “Iris?”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  I looked down at Junior from where he was holding me up in the air with both of his armed stretched out and wrapped around me neck, he looked more suspicious then worried, but there was some real concern in his eyes, so I gave him a grin and a thumbs up rather then a kick in his unprotected gut in return for checking to see if he was being too rough play fighting with his sister.

  And it would have been in his gut, not his groin. There are some things you just don’t do to a brother but on the other hand…

  “Ow! Not the hair!”

  At some point as the fight carried along through the walls, the castle seemed to start shifting us from one version of itself to another to spread out the damage, how it was doing so, and more importantly how it was deciding to do so was something I was going to have to look into. Doom had learned the hard way not to trust AI and I thought that was one of the few smart decisions he had ever made.

  After a few hours, Hulk powers proved their worth.

  None of the Fantastic Four had healing factors, which means that all the injuries I was inflicting on Junior not only added up but above that he plain old could just get tired.

  Too pissed to quit Hulk powers for the win.

  But Dooms had their pride.

  Bruised, bleeding, panting, and unable to stand entirely on his own, Junior was still in the fight.

  “I... I will not yield sister. If you want the throne... you will have to kill me.”

  I sighed as I stepped behind the privacy screen and slipped out of the torn uniform I had been holding up with one hand and tried on the little purple and gray go go style dress. Checking it out in the mirror I sighed and reached for the next outfit the dressing room had printed up for me.

  We had taken the fight back here after Junior nearly caused a full frontal wardrobe malfunction by stretching the edge of his forearm into a blade that sliced open the front of the first outfit I had ever worn in my new lifetime. Technically it was my birthday suit.

  Call him a crazed megalomaniac if you want, but big bro is still a gentleman and suggested a cease fire and I decided that ‘Hulk Flash!’ just didn’t sound right.

  “I’m not going to kill you Victor. And you can’t beat me in a straight up fight, not with stolen powers. I’m a Hulk by blood. My powers are my birthright, even if my existence is a crime against humanity.” I could hear him start to object. “And don’t go on about your intellect, or the powers of your mind inevitably beating the powers of a beast, I just as smart as you.”

  He made a scoffing sound. I’m not sure how to spell it, maybe ‘Pe-shaw?”

  I half bent around the screen, one arm folded over my chest while I pointed at him with my other hand, forcing my unhappy elder brother to avert his eyes. “You better not be making that sound because I’m a girl. I will not hold back on you out of respect for your delicate state of being dead in a tube for the last ten years on round two.”

  He shot me an offended look and I waved him away. “And go find something to drink, and bring me something too, we both just had a workout. You can even try to poison mine. The tears from your abject failure to find something that can hurt me will only make mine taste all the sweeter.”

  OMG! He actually grumbled.

  He still came back with two sealed glass bottles of some fancy Euro brand of water, letting me take my pick and he pointedly looked me up and down.

  “An interesting outfit for a battle.”

  I preened, twisting about in place to let him get a good look at the outfit before cracking the seal on the bottle of water and taking a delicate sip. The outfit I had printed up consisted of a purple jacket, matching skirt and pill box hat with Doom Green trim and viel over a large colored Grey shirt all based on Jacqueline Kennedy’s Pink Chanel suit.

  Cut down to expose a tasteful amount of abs.

  “That's because we aren't going to settle this by duking it out. I don’t want to kill you, and you can’t kill me, not without the time to prep some mad science, which as a Hulk I will just end up smashing because somehow you won’t predict that happening, and then the machine you build will go all wonky and threaten to destroy half of Europe until some, let’s say four, heroes sweep in to save the day and force us to agreed to settle things without violence… or do you think it would play out some other way?”

  His nostrils flared and I could see an angry diatribe rising, so I held up my hand palm out. “Sorry, I shouldn't have pushed your Richards button Victor. Let’s sit down and finish our drinks, then talk.”

  Victor nodded and nearly stomped over to an armchair before flopping down in it to drink his water, making it clear he was going to cooperate, but hate every moment of it.

  After a bit, he sighed. “What did you have in mind?”

  I set my drink aside, sat up in a posed manner, and nodded at him. “If you truly believe you are the rightful ruler of Latveria, then I concede the possibility that you very well might be. So let this matter be decided by the very laws of this nation you claim is rightfully yours.”

  “Let the courts decide.”

  He stared blankly at me, then stood to face away from me. For a moment, he seemed to struggle for control, then Victor Von Doom Jr. turned to me and nodded.

  “May the best Von Doom win.”