Chapter 600 We'll do that together too.
Because Ultron's attack last night was so sudden and unreasonable, no one present except Lenny and Tony could figure out what had happened.

In addition, the last wave of explosions almost destroyed the entire second-floor equipment area and half of the third-floor experimental area, causing the network and communication systems of the Avengers Building to be instantly paralyzed. In a short period of time, it became an isolated island and all contact with the outside world was completely cut off.

When Tony and his team finally restored communications, they had to deal with the news media that had smelled the poison and gathered downstairs in the building, as well as the continuous questioning from the military, Congress, the Senate, and the Security Council.

In short, by the time everyone had finally cleaned up the mess, the sky over New York had begun to turn white, and it was hard to find any trace of Ultron.

Fortunately, there is a SHIELD behind the Avengers, which is extremely good at cleaning up the mess for this "nosy group" of people. Therefore, up to now, the public has not fully known about the thrilling crisis last night.

But, I think it's just a matter of time...

"…You should be thankful that the scepter was not taken away by that devil, otherwise the hammer in my hand would fall on your face!"

Thor put the hammer in his hand down on the lab table with a thud. His face was very annoyed, his long golden hair stood on end, and his eyes were full of anger as he looked at Tony.

He didn't expect that the fundamental reason why Tony asked him to keep the scepter for a few days was to study something that Tony himself could not control at all, so that now everyone was in crisis.

Fortunately, Lainie's sniper shot last night came at a timely moment, disrupting Ultron's plan to take away the scepter in the chaos. Otherwise, the troubles that everyone would face now would probably be far more than that.

"..."

Facing Thor's accusation, Tony did not quibble, but just silently looked at the three dilapidated iron armors placed on the floor in front of him. The expression on his face could not tell whether it was regret or some other emotion.

Those were the three sets of iron armor that fell into Ultron's hands in last night's incident, Mark 43, Mark 39 Gemini and Rhodey's Mark 3 War Machine.

The former two were paralyzed one after another by the joint efforts of everyone when the incident happened, while the latter was even more tragic. He was simply used as a time bomb by Ultron, which detonated the Ark reactor in his chest, which also detonated the weapons and ammunition on board, and almost blew the entire equipment area into ashes.

"Are you going to just keep your mouth shut and say nothing?"

Seeing that Tony didn't respond, Thor frowned and raised his voice a few degrees.

Tony curled his lips when he heard that, looked up at Thor but still didn't respond, but then he turned his gaze to Lanie who had been silent beside him.

"How long did it take to grow? Four, five...it didn't exceed six hours. It broke through our restrictions and Jarvis's supervision in just six hours..."

"Tony! Now's not the time to talk about this."

Dr. Banner interrupted Tony, wondering if Tony had lost his mind due to the failure last night.

"When is the right time to say this?"

Tony turned around and looked at Banner seriously, his expression not showing any madness or irrationality at all.

"Project Ultron was a success, you can't deny that, right?

Even if we don’t know what went wrong in the process, at least it’s feasible, right? ”

"Tony, the Ultron plan we originally envisioned was not to create an executioner!"

Maya Hansen slammed the table in front of her.

"That's true, but whose fault was it? You, me, or Bruce?"

Tony did not flinch at all in the face of everyone's glares and accusations. Instead, he appeared very calm.

"We didn't set it up to kill people, on the contrary, we even set up a monitoring program specifically for this purpose!

Remember? The Three Laws of Robotics..."

Tony walked to the side of the experimental table and looked at the remains of the Iron Soldier placed on the table, his eyes filled with complex emotions.

"We didn't even finish developing Ultron. It completed the matching, fusion and self-learning on its own."

Everyone was silent, and for a moment the hall was once again filled with depressing emotions.

Leaning against the bar, Lainie watched all this silently. Perhaps among all the people present, she was the only one who could understand Tony's true fear and dread at this moment.

“But now it’s out of control, and that’s your responsibility.”

Zhao Hailun, who had been observing everyone from the side, suddenly spoke, like a sledgehammer hitting Tony's heart.

Yes, this is an indisputable fact about Tony. He is the leader of the Ultron plan. Now that the plan has gone wrong, he should be held responsible for it.

"Helen is right. Maybe your original intention was good, but you were wrong about one thing. You underestimated the danger brought by Ultron. You thought you could control it, but in the end you were harmed by it."

Steve folded his arms, his eyes firm and deep.

"Stark, we are not the SHIELD of the past, pointing guns at the whole world and calling it protection. We have experienced this once before."

"Are you saying I'm a HYDRA for doing this?"

There was a hint of anger in Tony's tone, but he quickly controlled himself, took a deep breath, and regained his senses.

"Do any of you still remember the wormhole above our heads and the aggressive Chitauri army?
They were right above our heads and could come at any moment."

Tony's eyes swept across everyone present, finally landing on Steve's face in front of him.

"We won by luck that time. The three of us, Roddy, Lainie and I, carried the nuclear bomb and delivered it to those guys.

Yes, we succeeded, we defeated them and closed the portal."

Tony took a step forward, closing the distance between him and Steve.

“But we paid a heavy price, didn’t we?
So what if such an invasion happens again? What should we do?"

"Solidarity," Steve replied firmly.

"What if we lose?" Tony asked again.

However, Steve still gave the same answer:
“Then we must unite even more.”

Everyone was silent, and the atmosphere in the hall seemed to become heavy again.

But this time, before anyone else could make a move, Lainie, who had been watching everyone, finally spoke.

"Things haven't reached the point of no return yet."

Upon hearing the words, everyone turned their eyes to Lainie, not understanding why she would make such a statement at this moment, but also expecting her to bring different insights.

"I wonder if you have ever thought about this, if Ultron really intended to destroy us in one fell swoop, then why did it try to escape with the scepter last night?" Steve frowned when he heard this. He really hadn't considered this.

"Maybe it's afraid of our large numbers? After all, we're all here together now."

Skye tilted her head as she offered her guess, but there was some confusion in her tone.

"But that also happens to be the best opportunity to catch us all in one fell swoop. It knows us very well, but we know nothing about it."

Lainie folded her arms and motioned for everyone to look at the equipment area which had been reduced to ruins.

"With this level of explosion, if Ultron had treated the Mark 43 and the Gemini as suicide trucks from the beginning, and had blown up War Machine along with them, I think there wouldn't be more than a handful of people here who would have survived, except for me."

Everyone looked at each other in surprise when they heard this, and they all saw a bit of solemnity and fear in each other's eyes.

"It clearly has the ability to severely injure all of us and then escape with the help of the network, but it still insisted on taking the scepter away. Don't you think this actually speaks volumes?"

Lainie's eyes swept over everyone present, and the one who reacted the fastest was Dr. Zhao Hailun, who knew nothing about combat.

"Is it afraid of you?"

"Bingo! But to be more precise, it is actually afraid of its own kind..."

Lainie smiled faintly and snapped her fingers, then walked into the middle of the crowd and took the control panel from Tony.

"For some reasons, in fact, long before Ultron started to fuse itself, I had discussed with Jarvis the possible harm that Ultron might cause, and--"

Under the puzzled gazes of the crowd, Lainie walked to the experimental table where Loki's scepter was placed and brought out a holographic model.

"We took some precautions."

Following Lainie's movements, a holographic model that everyone was familiar with was completed.

It was an artificial satellite, a high-tech low-Earth orbit satellite system that served only Stark Technology and the Avengers.

This is the Veronica satellite system that is well known to everyone.

Dr. Banner, who was standing next to him, was a little confused when he saw this. He thought, wasn't Veronica killed by Ultron together with Jarvis? What was Lenny trying to do now?

On the contrary, after Tony noticed the holographic model in front of him, a flash of enlightenment came into his mind and then his eyes lit up.

"Did you upload Veronica to the satellite beforehand?"

"Yep."

The corners of Lainie's mouth curled up slightly.

"In order to prevent the satellite system we developed from falling into the hands of the enemy due to Ultron losing control, I copied Veronica's data core before integrating the Ultron program and temporarily uploaded it to the satellite..."

As she spoke, Lainie raised her hand and tapped the holographic model twice, invoking a biometric authentication process in front of everyone.

"It's just that due to the data storage capacity limit of the satellite system itself, all I can do is copy the key parts of Veronica's huge database, and then temporarily cut off its direct connection with ground control from a physical level, making it an independent 'shadow' system to be activated."

Lainie stood in front of the biometric verification program and explained while allowing the verification program to obtain her iris and fingerprint information.

Following a slight electronic sound, a green prompt window popped up on the Veronica satellite system interface in the holographic model, clearly stating "Authentication successful".

"Veronica."

"What can I do for you, Miss Lainie?"

A gentle and familiar female voice came from the holographic model. At the same time, the holographic model in front of everyone changed and transformed into a scarlet data rose.

There is no doubt that this is the familiar artificial intelligence assistant Veronica.

"How are you now? Can you recover the damaged data?"

"Self-check in progress..."

The scarlet data rose slowly rotated, emitting a soft light, and after a moment, it replied:
“According to the self-test results, my key system modules remain intact, including logic processing, data analysis and self-repair functions.

However, some marginal data and auxiliary programs are indeed damaged, and I need the cooperation of Miss Lainie and Mr. Stark to complete further data repair."

Hearing this, Tony finally showed a look of relief on his face, and then hurriedly asked:
"Veronica, can you retrieve all the records of Ultron completing his fusion last night? Or can you find the last data about Ultron losing control?"

The crimson core was silent for a moment after hearing the voice, as if it was searching for relevant data, and only responded after a while.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Stark. Ultron has destroyed all data records within the past 24 hours, including detailed logs of its own fusion process and the last set of instructions before it went out of control. These data have been completely erased from the system, leaving no trace."

"Damn it!"

Tony cursed under his breath, obviously very unhappy with the result.

But then Tony realized that Lainie seemed to have only said half of what she said.

If Ultron is really afraid of something, then the source of this fear could be just Veronica, whose intelligence is far inferior to his own?

Then think of Lainie's hint of the plural form of "kindred" and her act of copying Veronica in advance.

Tony couldn't help but think of a possibility...

Noticing the subtle change in Tony's expression, Lainie smiled slightly, thinking that she really couldn't hide it from this guy.

So he didn't keep the secret and simply instructed Veronica to connect to the SHIELD database, ready to verify his authority as director and call up a copy of encrypted data.

"Connecting to the encrypted database [Hub], obtaining biometric authorization, decryption successful..."

Seeing this, no one raised any question, and everyone focused their attention on the encrypted data interface that was slowly displayed.

Instead, Deputy Director Maria Hill, who was standing next to her, hesitated to speak after seeing Lainie's actions.

However, she did not say anything to stop it in the end. Instead, she sighed silently and prepared herself mentally to face all kinds of doubts from the outside world again.

Then, under the eager gazes of everyone, Lainie skillfully retrieved an encrypted file marked as Level 8 Top Secret by SHIELD. The title of the file was -

【Theta Regulations】

(End of this chapter)

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