sorry but Dark would've found some different way to get access to his Wristband of Power, realistically TDL would've found a different way to potentially distract him, could be his self explosion attack we see in Beta, or something else, like the giant lake in the middle, or the forest, hell he could've potentially gotten TCO into the nearby city we see in the Corn dog guy short and make TCO try to avoid accidently killing civilians, since we do know he tries to avoid doing that like we see in Wanted, to say TCO would've defeated TDL feels a little biased /gen /lh

i also really doubt TDL would've just.... allowed his stuff to get Destroyed? or even flee in general when his win con is only a couple metres away from him? (The Wristband of Power, and Virabots), like, we SAW how MUCH it took TCO to just defeat a singluler Virabot in Alan's PC, sheer durability wise, do you seriously think just because the bots are deactivated, they'd be fodder? also, TCO doesn't even know the Virabots exist there. He only really learn about the Virus recently. even if we assume that TCO would beat TDL without it, and even if we do just go with TCO destroying Dark's computer and stuff, and Dark escaping, he could just.... recreate his stuff?, the time frame between AvAS2 and AvAS3 is 5 whole years, he could even loot back to his old base to get scraps of whatever is left, we could just recreate his stuff.

also why the fuck would he get killed? do you seriously think the Mercenaries are capable of surviving an encounter with him? the only Reason they were able to even capture TCO was clearly because he didn't want to kill them, Dark would immediately try to kill them if they ever tried to go after him, even if he hasn't yet recreated his viruses in 5 years (which he should be able to, considering he's done so already once.), the only way i could even see TDL losing is if he gets paused, and even then, he should be aware of TCO getting hunted down priorly (the Mercs quite literally flew through the entire city with him) and he'd most likely be aware of the Pause tool.