Generally speaking, the way of the warrior is a resolute acceptance of death.

-Miyamoto Musashi

Kyoto, Japan, 2055

Logan picked up the steaming bowl of tea and held it cupped in two hands over his kneeling thighs. With his eyes closed, he took a long moment to inhale the vapor curling up from the deep green foamy liquid, contemplating the aromas found within. He placed the bowl to his lips and tilted the liquid down his throat, the heat burning his mouth and tongue pleasantly. Drinking it quickly this way eliminated the need to be careful about getting the grey whiskers of his beard and mustache wet. He savored the austere simplicity of the flavor in the matcha and replaced the bowl onto the tatami mat.

With measured, precise movements, Logan picked up the long-stemmed bamboo ladle from it's balanced position on the lip of boiling-hot kettle and dipped it into the scalding water inside. He poured the hot water into his emptied tea bowl, replaced the ladle, and picked up the small bowl again, slowly tilting it this way and that, letting the water pick up the small particles that remained from the powdered tea mixture. Satisfied, he poured the water, now tinged a light green, into the kensui, with the rest of the waste water that came from a tea ceremony.

Logan took a long, steady breath, and bowed, lowering his head down towards the floor and placing his rough, gnarled hands on either side of his knees. There were more steps to the ceremony, but he often found trouble seeing them through after the actual drinking of the tea, and in truth he found no real fault in that. After all, as much as Japan had been his adoptive home at many different points of his life, he was still a western man, still a Canadian by birth, and if he felt like his tea ceremony was done when he actually drank the damn tea, well, that was alright with him. Yuriko might chide him for it later on, but his mind was on other things now.

He stood, straightening his black silk kimono as a westerner might straighten his suit jacket, and turned. The area where he performed his tea ceremony was in the far corner of a large, subterranean dojo, the floors covered in tatami mats, the ceilings low, the only light permitted coming from large oil lamps and the smoldering embers of incense. In the middle of the room, situated in a perfect row, each similarly garbed in black kimono and kneeling erect on the floor, were his six students. Their eyes were closed as they meditated, all except for Rin, who's milky, blind eyes tended to flutter open unconsciously.

Logan crossed the room and stood before them, making no sound at all despite his sandaled feet and the nightingale floors that he had had installed beneath the mats. Even the slightest pressure underfoot in the wrong area would cause the entire length of the underlying boards to emit a high-pitched chirp of polished wood rubbing against polished wood. One of the first tasks any of his students had to master when they first began their training here was to successfully navigate the room without disrupting the disclosing boards. Logan looked at Ciara, grim in her meditation, and grinned, remembering how the tall Italian girl had struggled with that task, unaccustomed as she was to ever treading lightly on command, if she tread lightly at all.

"Vascha," Logan snapped, calling out to the girl on the far end of the line. Like the others, she was garbed in black kimono, but with an unnatural matte neutrality to the color, much the way every inch of he body was so complected. As always, he had to struggle slightly to maintain a visual fix on her, even as she simply kneeled on the floor, as his eyes were redirected by her body's absorption of the ambient light around her.

Vascha did not reply, but that was part of the small test he had just given her. The students had been trained to never cease their meditation without an explicit command from Logan, and simply calling her name was not enough to fool her. She remained stoic and kneeling, her hands cupped slightly on her thighs in a meditative configuration above the appropriate chakra. Nevertheless, Logan could tell she was uncomfortable. She had never liked meditation, and he could hear her heart quicken when he called her name. She was still far too self-aware.

"I told you to meditate," Logan said, "Not sit on your knees and think about how bored you are."

For a split second, Vascha's black on black eyebrows furrowed, and Logan smiled. She might never be good at self-reflection and calming of the mind, but then again, neither was he. As instruction went, a fault in the student was inherently a fault in the teacher.

He looked at each of them in turn down the row. Vascha, black as tar and then blacker still, a Russian-born emigrant who no longer called any country home. Rin, with her flickering blind eyes that only served to fool others into thinking her a helpless Japanese youth. Ciara, who managed to hide the all the charm and good-nature of a grizzly bear in her attractive teenage frame. Hunter, an aerokinetic and, as a blood relative of Storm and Spyke, one of the last remaining generational X-Men. Gansükh, a lean and grim Mongolian boy with an eye for sniping and a facade of stoic impartiality that hid a genuine and warm persona beneath. And finally, Benjamin, the quiet boy from Israel who's entire story he had only shared with Logan.

Logan inhaled deeply through his nose and barked, "Up!"

With almost no delay, the six were on their feet at rested attention. Gansükh took a quick moment to sway his head from side to side, producing a small pop as the tendons loosened after the long period of inactivity. Ciara responded in kind, flexing the fingers in her deceptively powerful hands, making a symphony of crackles.

Logan regarded them for a long moment with a guarded measure of pride. He would not have dreamed even two decades ago that such a team would ever have been assembled. Would ever need to exist in the first place. Before him were six of the best-trained soldiers, warriors, and tacticians he had ever produced, a step beyond even the best X-Men he had trained over the years. Decades of drilling and training and suffering and fighting could be accumulated between them, the mutant war driving each of them from their rightful places in family and society. Each of them had taken more lives, fought more battles, and endured more pain than any person their age had the right or cause to in other circumstances.

War had made them, Logan always told himself, he had merely refined them. The thought of war caused him to reflect on the long years that had brought them all to this point.

After the outright fighting had begun all those years ago, the purpose and cause of the X-Men had shifted drastically. Where once they were a peacekeeping and humanitarian group, they had been forced to become a small and private band of soldiers, defending mutants wherever they could find them, doing the best the could to curb the outright slaughter that had blossomed from humanity's final and most desperate attack on mutant kind. The Terminus Virus.

No one knew or could even venture a guess where it had come from. It was not even fully understood when it had been introduced into the mutant population. To many, it simply seemed to appear out of no where into their lives. A brutally efficient airborne virus, it attacked the reproductive organs of any mutant or X-gene carrier it came into contact with, rendering an entire facet of the human race completely sterile. A mutant child had not been born in almost a decade, but the vast majority of mutants had been infected long before that. Logan's thoughts turned to Kathryn Pryde and her husband Kurt Wagner, the heartbreak in their eyes when an aged Dr. McCoy had explained Kathryn's seeming infertility to them.

Tragically, Terminus was not even discovered until, by all accounts, the mutant cause had been a success. Almost worldwide, the combined efforts of Charles Xavier and Magnus Lehnsherr had finally begun to take hold, tolerance and understanding taking root where fear and suspicion had once ruled. Mutants could attend school, hold jobs, run for political office, or opt to do none of those things at all. Finally, such things had been their own choice, and no one else's. For a time, Hank had even become head of the biology department at John's Hopkins University. It was there that he had begun to collect census data on the mutant population publicly for the first time, and it was there that Hank had begun to suspect that all was not right with the world's mutant citizens

"It's curious," Hank had said, looking down his aging blue nose through glasses (that were thicker than Logan remembered the last time he had visited) at a stack of paper, each containing various sets of data from mutant around the world, "But it would seem as though the mutant birth rate has began to slow dramatically across almost the entire world. Some areas have not seen a pregnant female mutant in nearly a year."

Logan shrugged, "There were a couple years there when making babies wouldn't have seemed like the kindest idea for a mutant, Hank. S'probably just contingency data."

"It's more than that," Hank intoned, looking up at him from his wooden desk, which had intentionally been built oversized to accommodate the ape-like mutant's gigantic form, "This is a trend even in areas where the mutant-human tension was never even an issue."

Logan hadn't even been aware that such areas existed on the planet. He raised an eyebrow, "So what's the deal?"

"I don't know," Hank answered, delving back into his data, "I don't know."

Even Hank could not have guessed the magnitude of the situation. When he finally did, it was all but too late. Every mutant on the planet had been infected, and while some seemed to fight it better than others, the virus was strong, cunning, and savage. And it had won. Even in Logan, who's healing factor had deflected nearly every disease and poison and wound and bacteria known to man, had been susceptible. He was as sterile as any other mutant now. The blow had been even harder to endure when Hank discovered that, on top of all the brutality of the Terminus Virus, it was not natural; It had been manufactured and introduced to mutantkind intentionally.

Hank had tried his best to keep that information a secret, but nearly half a dozen of his lab technicians and assistants were mutants, and soon the terrible truth of Terminus was a public terrible truth. Logan remembered Kathryn's congressional address, where she begged and pleaded, with tears running down her face, to the mutant community, imploring them not to lash out, not to seek retribution for the terrible fate that had been forced upon them so cruelly. She spoke with such passion and vigor that Logan had believed, honestly and truly, that things might be alright after all.

It had been all of two days after her speech that the first mutant attack on humans occurred. No one could be sure who had been responsible. No one had ever claimed credit for the assault, but when the Eiffel Tower in Paris had fallen, and not only fallen, but pushed onto it's side by an invisible force, killing nearly three hundred foreign tourists and French, there was no question as to the motive and message. The war had begun in full, whether mutants and humans liked it or not. Some had even suspected, laughably, that the long-dead Magneto had somehow faked his own demise and returned with a righteous fury. But Logan himself had smelled the death on Lehnsherr's coffin. It was not him, nor his ghost.

The response by the human governments of the world had, at first, been refreshingly restrained. Mutants with a history of criminal activity were detained and questioned, and who could blame them for that? Next the X-Men and all of the current and former students were called to inquiry, and in the interest of preserving human-mutant relations, they had agreed. But then, more human deaths in Moscow, in Tokyo, in Dubai, in New York City. And with each incident, the nations of the world had tightened their grip on the mutant population and squeezed.

The Mutant Registration Act was dusted off and brought back to the table. And it had passed.

A law requiring all mutants to wear power-inhibiting experimental devices was drafted. And it had passed.

And finally, the long-dormant Sentinel program was brought forward to be reactivated. And it was.

Mutants had been a danger before, even Logan could admit that, when individuals and sometimes small groups had lashed out at the world around them out of anger and fear, when Magneto's Brotherhood and then his Acolytes tried to exact the man's will by force. But now? Now mutants as a whole had been threatened the world over, and the danger was so much more palpable. With every day, with every new insult to their human rights, and with every mutant mother that could never conceive a child, came a fury that could not be contained. For every mutant that was detained, two more would take to the streets the next day, using their powers however they could to wreak havoc on a world that no longer cared for them.

Logan remembered Lance Alvers, his once lean and boyish face now rugged and scarred and bearded, fifty feet high on a hijacked video screen in Times Square, his voice bellowing down on the crowd of shocked and frightened humans.

"Until the creator of the Terminus Virus comes forward and claims responsibility for his crimes against mutantkind," he scowled, "Humans will die every single day. We will know the truth, or we will take as many of you insects down with us as we can!"

Shortly after his message, there no longer was a Times Square. Buried under an avalanche of pavement, concrete, steel, and broken flesh.

But no one did come forward, and no truth was to be had. And the death had continued.

For a time, the X-Men had worked with the American military, operating much as they had before, using their own strengths to subdue others, to suppress the violence, to keep both sides from tearing each other apart. But then the reports came back that Wolfsbane and Iceman and Berzerker and Cyclops had each been detained while on an assistance mission in South Africa. Ororo had raged over the phone for hours with their military contacts, demanding an explanation, and getting stonewalled. Logan could still remember the hundreds of lightening strikes that enunciated her fury that day. Then others went on missions and never came back. And still Storm's rage went unheeded.

Until the Battle of Manhattan. Logan suppressed a grimace as the memory of that day came back to him.

Of all things, he remembered the body armor distinctively. For a long time, the X-Men had worn little more than reinforced jumpsuits, designed to instill a non-threatening but authoritative presence in the minds of the public. They had been simple almost to the point of laughability, looking like little more than pajamas on some of the students. Even as the outfits evolved over time, becoming sleeker and harsher, they had always maintained that common thread. But no longer. Shadowcat, Nightcrawler, Cannonball, Colossus, Sunspot, and others, new recruits, telepaths and healers and energy-casters and ferals, each wore their newly-fabricated armor. Military by design, gone were the skin-tight getups that they had once paraded themselves in. Thick carbon fiber weaves, ceramic and kevlar plating, bio-metric readouts, all painted with black urban camouflage. The days of sending messages to a fearful public were over. These suits were designed to take abuse, and a lot of it. They were designed to keep the wearer alive. They were designed to intimidate. Even on Kathryn's middle-aged body, she cut a severe and powerful figure, nano-fibers in her suit mimicking the strength and speed she had possessed as a young woman. The X-Men now dressed for war.

It had not been enough.

They had gathered outside of the Manhattan building. A transmission had been intercepted; The American government had decided that they had had their fill of domestic mutant terrorism, and if that meant rounding them all up one at a time, that was fine. Sentinels, what few now remained after so many had been destroyed by mutants all over the world, streaked across the sky, their thrusters aglow even in the bright light of day. Down Madison Avenue, tanks and soldiers progressed south at a steady, terrible rate, headed towards the Xavier School.

"We gotta split up," Logan had said to the mutants around him as they stood in the large doorway of the building, "My team will run diversion. There's no way we can strong-arm 'em toe-to-toe. Nightcrawler, your team runs evac."

Nightcrawler, Kurt Wagner, the blue elf, one of the oldest and most talented teleporters in the word, led a small elite team of 'porters he had trained specially himself. They were going to be working overtime to get all of the mutants who had sought out Xavier's School as a refuge out of the city.

"Ja," Kurt said, shifting uncomfortably in his new armor, to which he had still taken the time to affix his now-trademark red sash, "Ve'll get zem out."

He could never have known how badly it would all go. Logan tried to remember if Kurt and Kathryn had even taken the time to say goodbye before his team had departed from the building, or if their only meaningful moment of that day really had been those last seconds, filled with blood and tears and horror. He could never, would never, be sure.

Logan sighed, then fixed his attention back to his students. War had made them, he told himself again, he had just refined them.

"Even though," Logan said quietly, his voice almost lost in the open space of the dojo, "We're a dying species, what should stop us from trying to survive?"

The teenagers were too well-trained to exchange glances or raise incredulous eyebrows, but he could detect their shift in attitude at his unusual turn of phrase. He was not usually one to be poetic or decorate his speech.

"Sensei?" Vascha ventured, bracing herself slightly for a reprimand for speaking out of turn.

In most cases, a reprimand is exactly what she would have received. Today though, Logan simply frowned and looked at her for a long moment. Each student began to shift uncomfortably. Hunter cleared his throat, and instantly looked as though he regretted doing it.

"You've all made me proud to be called that," Logan said, switching to Japanese. He had taught them bits and pieces of every language that he knew, but Japanese had been one of their main focuses, if for no other reason than Kyoto was their base of operations, and because oftentimes his gruff English sounded to harsh and informal in the dojo. "You have all accomplished more than I could have hoped for. Whatever the world may call us, terrorists, killers or fanatics, you've all helped save lives. I wish things were different. I wish you could all go home, have families, have children, but that's not the reality we live in anymore.

"You've heard me talk about Professor Xavier," he continued, "About the kind of man he was. I can't lie to you, he would not be proud of the state of the world. He wouldn't agree with what I've taught you. But surviving today is not the same thing as surviving then. And even though mutants are a dying species, we still have the right to life. You are the protectors of that right."

A long silence passed. He could tell that the students were uncomfortable. In all of the years he had known them, he had rarely said more than two sentences at a time to them, and almost never had he waxed philosophical the way he had just done. Logan waved a hand in the air dismissively.

"Forgive me," he said, "I must finally be getting old. You're dismissed."

The six knelt and bowed deeply, as was customary, and he returned the gesture. They turned to file out of the dojo, exchanging no words or glances, maintaining the silence that had been drilled into them.

Benjamin, the last in the line, turned back to look at Logan before closing the sliding rice paper door.

"Sensei?"

"Yes, Benjamin?"

"Is..." the young man looked uncomfortable, rubbing the back of his neck. Though all of Logan's students were inherently quiet, Benjamin was the least likely to pose Logan with a direct question, and it made him uneasy to do so, "Is everything alright?"

"Yes," Logan lied, "Everything is alright."

"You've made a mess, Logan."

Logan turned as Yuriko entered the room, pushing her kimono beneath her knees as she lowered herself to the floor beside him. She looked him up and down, then looked at the small piles of silver and black hair that covered the floor around him.

"You haven't cut your hair in a long time," she said, her tone not betraying any feelings she might have on the matter.

Logan shrugged, looking at the lone claw on his right hand that he'd been using to hack at the locks, "It's like riding a bicycle, darlin'."

Yuriko smiled slightly and took Logan's clawed hand in hers, guiding him with a deftness and skill that should have been surprising in a woman her age, but not to Logan.

Cutting off the topknot had been simple enough, but once his long, thick hair had tumbled down to his shoulders, Logan had begun to simply hack at it hit his claws, trying to remember how he had done it before.

Yuriko took finger-fulls of his hair and grasped his hand, using the razor sharp blade to slice through as though it wasn't there. She worked quickly, sometimes pulling on Logan's arm unnaturally, tweaking the shoulder joint, but he did not complain. For a moment he felt the urge to warn her against the sharpness of the claws, but thought better of it. Yuriko was as familiar with adamantium as he was.

"You're leaving," she said as she trimmed.

"Yes," Logan replied. There was no sense in denying it.

"You believe he can be trusted?"

Logan knew that Yuriko read his limited correspondence with his contacts around the world. It was part of their bargain that allowed he and his students to live in her family's ancestral home. Still, this was the first time she had ever asked him about anything she read directly.

"As much as I trust anyone."

"Do you trust me?" she asked.

Logan turned to look at her. She was old now, nearly eighty, he face showing wrinkles etched out of a life of combat and trial, her hair now thin and white in the tight bun she wore, but her eyes, dark and deep and brutally honest, were still the eyes of the girl he had once loved. He reached out and stroked her cheek lightly with his rough hand.

"Always," he said.

Yuriko nodded and closed her eyes, leaning her head into his hand, and at the same time shrugging it away as kindly as she could.

"Then listen to me when I tell you not to go."

Logan grunted. He had known his departure would not be without its snares.

"I don't have a choice on this one," he said, "If the intel is right, this could be the one shot we have."

"To do what?" she asked, her mild tone still not giving way to the tempest of emotions that he could practically smell on her, "You cannot bring any of them back, Logan. All you can do now is save lives, protect the weak from the strong, undo what small damages can be undone. You can do all of those things without wasting your life on a final banzai. Vengeance will not make life easier for any of us."

"Vengeance is all I have left," he said, "I made a promise a long time ago. I made a promise that I would make the people responsible for all of this pay."

"You've made many promises, Logan."

"Yuriko..."

She did not reply, and for a few minutes, Logan believed that she might have dropped the topic altogether. Finally, she finished cutting his mane of hair, and moved his claw up to his face, grasping his hand lightly in her palm. With only half a dozen precise movements, she trimmed the long beard and mustache that Logan had allowed to grow back into the thick sideburns that were once a staple of his appearance. Logan sheathed the claw she had used and felt his face. Smooth as any barber's shave.

Logan looked into the small, round mirror on the wall, regarding his newly shorn and shaved visage. He could not hide some of the surprise he felt. Time, it seemed, had finally begun to get the better of him. His hair now cut to the wolfish style that he had worn much of his life only seemed to make a mockery of his aging appearance, forcing him to compare himself now with the face that had stared back at him in the mirror many years ago. His beard had obscured deep crevices that had formed into the leathery skin of his cheeks and around his mouth. Hard lines formed in a spiderweb pattern around his eyes, making his face appear as hard and unyielding as battered granite when his squinted. Somewhere along the line, his eyebrows had turned almost completely grey, and only now seeing them without his equally greying beard made him really take notice.

"If your contact is right, you'll be going to your death," Yuriko said, her voice cracking every so slightly, though her aged face remained stoic and passive.

Logan stood, dusting silvery black hairs off of his body. He allowed his loosened kimono to slide from his shoulders and pool around his feet like a black puddle. He crossed the room and opened a wooden chest. Like a rush of memories, the scents from the old clothes nearly knocked him back. The residual smells of people and places and events were still powerful even after all of this time. Logan pulled several pieces of black body armor from the chest and began to dress.

"We're all going to our death," he said, not turning to look at her as he fastened the belt of his pants, "I'm going after the man responsible."

"Your students will never forgive you."

"They'll be fine."

"I'll never forgive you."

Logan stopped and turned to face her. Tears were welling in the corners of her eyes. She drew a silk handkerchief from within the folds of her obi and dabbed at them. He went to her and raised her up by her shoulders, the feeling of her frail body beneath his hands making him strangely sad.

"I promised your father that I'd take you as my wife," he said, "And take his place as the head of your clan. But that was another time. We can't have that anymore."

Yuriko's father, Kenji, had been the genius that had mastered the metal adamantium that had been bonded to Logan's skeleton. He had even been the man that had proposed the process that would make the bonding possible. A lifetime ago, Logan had come to Japan seeking vengeance on the him, only to find a frail old man, head of a weakening Yakuza family, that had begged his forgiveness, offering his own life as penance for Logan's suffering. In that time, Logan and Yuriko, a young woman then, a fierce warrior, had fallen in love. After Kenji's death, Logan had left, promising to one day take his place when he returned, taking on the mantle of Kenji's empire, newly invigorated at Logan's hands. But, again, that had been a lifetime ago, and the world was a different place now.

Yuriko sighed, fighting away the tears, brushing them off of her cheeks almost indignantly.

"I know," she finally said, "I know, my love. I've known for a long time. My family dies with me. It would seem karma is not through exacting it's payment for what he did to you."

"The students," Logan said, trying to avoid that painful topic, "Keep them safe."

She nodded, "They are like the children I never had. You know they will always have a home here."

She laughed suddenly and added, "But you know they will never stop. They will follow the way you have taught them until the day they die. You are their sensei."

Logan smiled morosely, "That's why I have to go. I have to try and stop this while there's still a chance for them to live a life without violence and death."

"Is such a life even possible for them anymore?" she asked rhetorically, looking into his eyes in that penetrating way of hers.

Logan kissed her once lightly on her cheek, her dry, papery skin a bitter memory of the youth that had left her too soon for both of them. He pulled her in to embrace her, his arms nearly swallowing her thin figure up. She grasped at his bare back with her fingers, both of them knowing that it was very likely the last time they would ever touch one another.

"I don't know," he said.

When the students awoke the next morning at dawn, Logan was nowhere to be found. They would never see their master, their teacher, their sensei, again.