"Your father's last equation," she whispered. "He cried when he wrote it. He said, 'The son should not pay for the father's sins.'"

Vanko, hearing his father's old colleague's name, hesitated for one second. That was enough. Tony sliced through Vanko's whips and overloaded the Hammer drones with a precise electromagnetic pulse derived from Nino's reactor design.

"მადლობა, ნინო. დანარჩენს მე გავუმკლავდები." (Thank you, Nino. I’ll handle the rest.)

Three weeks later, in his Malibu workshop, Tony Stark was running a passive scan for any mention of palladium signatures. His suit’s AI, now adapted to scan global media, flagged a strange anomaly. The Georgian audio track of Iron Man 2 —specifically the line spoken by "Vanko"—contained a mathematical cipher that matched his father’s lost notes on a secondary arc reactor design. A design that Howard Stark had hidden not in a diorama, but in a forgotten Soviet-era technical journal he co-authored during a 1970s peace conference in Tbilisi.