Iron and Frost (2025 series) #3

Emma Frost is trapped in her non-telepathic diamond form to keep her alive without a heart. Tony Stark has fused with his Iron Man armour and its AI has taken over as the Iron King. He's been working with James Rhodes (War Machine) and his adopted daughter Eris Vale (Landslide) in the Hellfire Club's abandoned mansion trying to find a cure for the X-virus. WM found a neuro-key that Tony needed but got infected by the virus. And last issue ended with IK killing him to protect his research.

Emma remembers how her father used to beat her. But she also reminds us how Eris lost her mother to the X-virus (#1) but also found a new loving father in Rhodey. Landslide is of course devastated and lashes out with her power to bury Iron King in rocks. Emma stops her but Eris accuses her of a selfish reason, because she wants IK/Tony to make her a new heart. Meanwhile IK's X-virus test subjects have broken out of their containment fields and are understandably not happy. But IK remotely activates the WM armour and they both start blasting the innocent patients. However Landslide and Frost hold *them* back. Emma tries to get through to the Tony within but IK blasts *her*. And strangely it hurts her even in her invulnerable diamond form. She wonders out loud just what is giving the IK suit so much power ...

... and gets answered by Tony Stark's voice coming from the empty War Machine armour. But he doesn't exactly answer her question before he has to fight off the Iron King. In a lull in the battle Tony makes the WM armour encase Emma to protect her and allow them to communicate more easily, and then appears as a hologram. But the escaped patients are attacking them all with their mutant powers, and 'War Machine' and Landslide have to join Iron King in fighting them off - non-lethally in their case. In between telling Frost how to operate the armour, Stark gives her some explanations.

1st of all he explains that he's *not* Tony Stark who was 'consumed' by the Iron King. He's an AI avatar Tony built to help himself. He hid himself within the IK behind layers of Psycho-Man tech that Rhodey liberated from the Baxter Building, and he's apparently managed to send Rhodes on missions that IK wasn't aware of (as became clear last issue). Jim also obtained a chronal splitter built by Dr Doom, and lastly a psychic amplifier from the X-Mansion. AI Tony now has all these installed in the WM armour which he reboots to bring them online. The plan now is to send a telepathic warning back through time to himself to try to prevent the Age Of Revelation that they're in. IK blasts 'War Machine' to stop them, and Emma is given the last piece of info. When Firestar went critical (#1 again) Iron King shrank her with Pym Particles and installed her within him as a living battery.

Anger-fuelled Frost/WM attacks IK who tries to justify everything he's done as saving humanity.  Holo-Tony initiates the message to the past before IK rips him apart, but Tony's voice still reports progress on the transmission. IK tries to stop it by causing Firestar to overload which will destroy them all along with maybe all of the X-virus-infected US east coast. The patients run away. And IK is going to blow before the transmission completes.

But Emma/WM flies him into the sky to try to get him far enough away. She tries again to get through to the Tony Stark that she believes is somewhere inside him. To do so she switches out of her diamond form even though it will kill her. This allows her to use her telepathy to bring Tony to the surface, and he stops IK's countdown. Emma allows herself to die at last. But then Iron King takes back control and resumes the countdown until Firestar explodes within him.

The issue ends with some scenes from the previous issues (in reverse order). But then jumps further back to Tony Stark's lab years before the Age Of Revelation where the message from the future arrives in a computer.