Reincarnated As Tony Stark With A Skill - Volume 3 Chapter 96 Trial 2

Gladiator: “What do you say?”

Tony: “What? You think I’ll just plead guilty? Are you people stupid? Why would I do that when things are clearly much more complicated than they seem.”

Gladiator: “Complicated? How is it complicated? The evidence”

Tony: “No. It really is complicated.

It wouldn’t be if we weren’t in some sort of trial. But we are. There’s a reason the members of my species hate going to trials. But here we are. You guys brought this on yourselves.”

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Since Tony’s needed some time to set things up, he decided to take his time in the trial. His companies have a lot of lawyers. He might as well use them.

He called all his lawyers, from the Stark Industries, Space S, as well as all the other companies secretly under his control, to their respective companies for an emergency meeting. As they arrived, he gave them details similar to the trial. Then, he had them prepare the most elaborate defense they can.

He had them treat case as top priority and given them the restriction of not allowing them to use lawyer jargon. Tony was the one going to be saying all the stuff they prepared. He was not going to make things hard on himself. Not only did he not want to memorize those annoying terminologies, he’s also pretty sure that those kinds of stuff are only useful on Earth.

After receiving their various defense, he had them stay on stand-by in case he needed anything.

The Shi’ar thought Tony was defending for himself but in truth, his army of lawyers was the one fighting for him. (AN:: IDK why lawyers don’t represent themselves but they just don’t.)

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Tony started talking about how his guilt couldn’t just be established. He first demanded a lot of things to be proven or established to be true before he would even think about pleading guilty. He even suggested for everyone present to get comfortable as they can as he wasn’t going to easily give up.

The first thing on his list of things was about the video. While the video displayed scenes of the D’Bari’s genocide taking place. There were too many cuts in the evidence presented.

He demanded the complete video to be presented. He made the Shi’ar display the records of not only the sun going nova but also the records that show proof of the events taking place at the same time.

The Shi’ar complied but pointed out that displaying the videos individually would take time. This was what Tony wanted so he pointed out how some things could be missed if the multiple videos were displayed at the same time.

He watched patiently as each evidence was presented.

The others who attended the trial weren’t as patient. Other than the Watcher, everyone else seemed to be bored after watching the same scene multiple times. They weren’t able to do much though because as Tony pointed out, they were in trial.

After all the footage has been shown, Tony then questioned the authenticity of the footage.

Tony: “Now that the evidences have been presented, how can we make sure the evidence isn’t doctored. Back on my planet, there are people who could do these kinds of stuff. And those were done manually. On film. IF that was possible, then such a thing can happen in your digital evidence can’t it?”

Gladiator: “We already investigated those in charge of handling the footage. Minders have already looked in their minds and checked for signs of them tampering with evidence. They have already found no such thing.”

Tony: “First, there’s a lot of things wrong with that. The footage may be not tampered but it doesn’t mean it isn’t fake. For all I know, you have the whole start system in some sort of simulation. And that’s just one. There’s also the reliability of your minders. How am I supposed to know if they’re not in on it?”

Tony kept pointing out flaws in the opposition’s arguments. He pointed out many ways the evidence could have been forged.

He pointed out many different things to divert their attention from someone. He wanted them to forget about the Watcher.

Tony was certain that the Watcher, in the location, or some other Watcher witnessed the whole thing. They may swear an oath of non-interference but it wasn’t certain if such thing included becoming witnesses in such trials. He could question if the Watcher is truly a Watcher but once that was proven, Tony would lose a lot of time.

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While Tony was busy b*llsh*ting his way in the trial, his All-Black symbiote was busy coordinating an apocalypse.

During his test on the Death Commandos, he determined that his symbiote was different from all other symbiotes. Unlike the ones from the Venom movie which were, his symbiote was created from a shadow.

He was able to use this characteristic on quite a few things. First is infiltration, scanners usually scan for foreign matter. They don’t usually check shadows.

Next was on controlling a target. During his test with the Death Commandos. He initially had a hard time taking control of their bodies. When he made a move, they actively tried to fight and take back control over their bodies. They tried to move around which made it hard for Tony to bond completely. He didn’t have much experience taking bodies after all as he didn’t try such things before.

Tony was able to bypass this obstacle by doing things slowly. He spent some time becoming a part of the target’s shadow. During that time, he would slowly infiltrate their bodies. The target didn’t feel the infiltration so by the time Tony had infiltrated every inch in their body, it was too late for the target to fight back.

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With the Phoenix help, Tony was able to have more control over his symbiote body. He created a LOT of shadow clones. Then, all of them were bonded to his symbiote. The Phoenix was there to make sure the consciousness remained in the symbiote when the clones dispersed. This saved Tony from having to do the lengthy ritual every time he wanted to bond a clone’s soul to his symbiote. The Phoenix also allowed Tony to have enhanced control over each off-shoot symbiote.

Since Tony could create trillions of clones, the result of the test was Tony’s symbiote body becoming something akin to a zombie virus. The only difference was instead of needing to bite someone to get him infected, he just needed to be near his target. He had a restriction with his count limit but as his clone capacity was already massive, he could theoretically infect every person on a single planet. It still wasn’t enough to take over a Star System though

With Tony essentially becoming a zombie apocalypse, he decided to operate like one. If there is one thing he learned from Earth’s zombie apocalypse stories, it was to wait until everyone is infected. He needed to make sure most of the targets were infected before he made any kind of move or else they might fight back.

And that is what he was currently doing.

With most of the higher-ups of the Shi’ar Empire in here, he was sure that there were security personnel everywhere. And unlike Earth’s security agencies which don’t work together, they have better relationsh.i.p.s with each other. This made it easy to get into contact with all branches of their military. This was a great opportunity to attack.

When he got control of his first few ranking officers in each patrol ship, he had them go to spaceship gathering areas to do all kinds of things. Resupply or taking a prisoner in, it didn’t matter as long as they got near another person. He would then start infecting more military personnel until he got to the more special people.

Tony was eventually able to infect some of the Imperial Guards. (Oracle was off-limits as she was on guard the whole time) They had higher authority than most other people so they were able to board any of Shi’ar’s military spaceship. And without something like the Kree’s Supreme Intelligence that could micromanage each soldier in their fleet, the Shi’ar’s space fleet slowly but easily taken over.

After taking over a ship, Tony would then operate the spaceship using his shadow clones. He did this because he didn’t want to expose his Symbiote to the whole Galaxy.

Unlike his shadow clone which could be disguised as some mutant, scientific, or magical ability, symbiotes were much more unique. They were unique enough that even the Shi’ar Empire, who traded with other empires, had barely any information on them. It felt safer to risk exposing his shadow clone ability than the existence of the symbiotes.

Besides, he was currently dressed up as Darth Vader. It would be a shame to introduce the Galaxy to Darth Vader without introducing the Storm Troopers.

Tony already had a proper Storm Trooper uniform ready. Though it had Vibranium lining, Tony didn’t focus on the armor as much. The extra protection wasn’t necessary for him. He was going to just use his shadow clones anyway. He could easily replenish his army so having them better protected wasn’t that important.

Instead, he had to focus on the weapons. While Tony was able to clone anything on his body, the weapons cloned with him were a problem. Most high tech equipment wouldn’t function and when they did, it used up his chakra. Tony was about to end up arming his clones with melee weapons up until he remembered about the lightspeed engines.

The engine was able to draw power from the Tesseract while being separated and far away from the Tesseract. Tony utilized the same concept and was able to build different types of blaster that drew power from the Tesseract.

With the weapons and costume all prepared, Tony started creating the clones. Storm Troopers started filling up the Shi’ar spacesh.i.p.s.

As he oversaw the takeover of the space fleet, Tony had a thought in his mind. He shouldn’t have chosen to use the Storm Trooper costumes. Instead, he should have gone with the Clone Army costumes. Their skills are way better than the Storm Tropers. Also, the name is convenient.The adding a word in the Clone army would make things accurate. He would have called it the Shadow Clone Army.

(AN: FYI. Prequel trilogy is not yet released since it still isn’t 1999.)

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Back at the Trial

Tony was still spouting something that he used as a defense.

Emperor D’ken gave Gladiator a look of impatience.

Gladiator: “Enough!!! You are just delaying the inevitable. If you are just going to question the legitimacy of all the evidence, then any further problems would be ignored.”

Tony already received the report that everything was ready. He didn’t need to stall any longer. “Fine. I have one last thing.”

Gladiator: “Speak.”

Tony: “Since not a single one of you could even comprehend the fact that the Phoenix and I are two separate entities, I just want to know a couple of things.

One, how many people died on that day?

(SFX: Imperial March )

And two, how many people are currently in Chandilar?”

Gladiator called someone to answer Tony’s first question, as for the second, he didn’t answer immediately. “Why do you want to know how many people are currently in Chandilar?”

Tony: “Good. At least it’s not less.

As for your question.

Easy. Since I’m obviously going to be found guilty, I might as well kill the same number of people.”

Right as Tony finished his sentence, BOOOM, explosions were heard from all over Chandilar.

The explosions were timed to reach the place of Trial at the same time. It caused quite a disturbance as even Gladiator, the strongest person in all of Shi’ar, moved from his current position.

Gladiator was able to stabilize himself quickly and zoomed towards Tony.

When he was close to Tony, Tony (as Darth Vader) lifted his hand and tried to Force Choke.

Gladiator didn’t know what Tony was doing but he felt something. His airways were blocked (by the symbiote) and he couldn’t breathe no matter what he did.

Tony waited for him to do something, but Gladiator didn’t show any reaction. As it turns out, Gladiator has an incredibly large lung capacity. Though Tony did stop him from breathing, it would still take a lot of time before he was choked to death. He just continued towards Tony thinking that all would return to normal as soon as Tony is incapacitated.

As he grabbed Tony by the neck, Tony just smiled derisively at him. “So, are you going to kill me now? Do you want the honor of slaying the Phoenix?”

Gladiator felt his airways getting unblocked to he responded: “I would stop being confident if I were you. I can kill you whenever I want.”

Tony: “Really now? Are you sure about that?”

Gladiator: “Stop with those antics. Tell me, what did you do?”

Tony: “Didn’t I already tell you about this before? If that wasn’t clear enough, then I’ll change things up a bit.

Since you people already judged me to be guilty, I decided to just go with it and do the crime.”

After finishing his speech, another round of explosions was heard.

When Gladiator looked at their surroundings, he saw holes all over the place. Through those holes, he saw smoke coming out of buildings. He also heard from his super hearing, the screams and cries coming from the residents of the Chandilar.

Tony felt the grip on his neck getting tighter so he said something while he still can. “What? You think I can’t hear what you are thinking?

Are you the only one allowed to kill people? Am I not allowed to kill others?”

After saying this, another round of explosions was heard.

Gladiator: “You could have demanded a trial by combat. Instead, you kill all those innocent civilians.”

Tony: “Innocent? Those people? Please. They don’t even know who I am. Yet they already deemed me to be guilty before the trial even started.”

BOOM. Another round of explosions

Gladiator wanted to crush Tony’s neck but a hand grasped his arm. He looked at the owner and saw Oracle trying to set Tony free.

Gladiator: “Oracle? What do you want?”

Oracle: “Release him.”

Gladiator: “Why? He deserves to die”

Oracle: “You need to calm down. Every time he talks, an explosion happens. Release him first. We need to stop him from killing more people first.”

Gladiator got her point and loosened the grip on Tony’s neck.

Tony gave Oracle some thanks. At the same time, he told her something telepathically. He assured her that while he did kill the citizens of Chandilar, he only killed the ones who he deemed hopeless. The people who are stupid enough not to believe in something even if it is right in front of them.

Tony: “Ah that’s better.”

A chair floated from the audience area towards Tony. He sat on the chair and waited for the two to do something.

Gladiator tried to contact his men but none of them answered. He was just answered by the Storm Troopers. He looked at Oracle to check on her subordinates. She told him that she also got the same answer.

The two then looked towards Emperor D’ken and Lilandra for instructions.

Lilandra was currently busy with her communicator trying to have a semblance of control over the situation.

D’ken, on the other hand, was just sitting calmly looking at Tony with interest.

Tony felt his gaze and was a little creeped out: “Please stop staring at me. I don’t like guys and I am definitely not gay.”

D’ken just laughed after hearing Tony. “Interesting. Very interesting. I don’t know how you managed to pull that off. It is impressive. Tell me, do you think you can escape after doing such a thing?”

Tony: “Escape? I think you should be the one who should start running.”

D’ken laughed “You think you have won? You can’t even get away from this planet. Let me ask you something, do you think you are fast enough to go back to your world?”