My note: I don't own characters and concepts. Does anyone even read these things? I had a couple of decent ideas about what to do with Naruto in terms of powers. I've also been really distracted. Meh. And for everyone that keeps asking, we'll get to the Forbidden Scroll soon enough.
New York Ninja
Part 7
"This better be important, Colonel," the General said. He was Wraith's direct superior, the commander of SHIELD. Colonel Wraith had established a video link to SHIELD HQ. The General was an older man, with grey hair and a bushy moustache. He hadn't seen combat in some time. He didn't know what the real world was like. "You know I hate to be interrupt---"
KABOOM!!
The entire complex shook with what sounded like a thunderous explosion. Plumes of dust rained from the ceiling. The lights flickered and died, along with their connection to SHIELD. "What was that?!" Wraith demanded.
"I-I don't know!" A nervous technician stammered.
"An explosion!" Another technician reported. "It came from the lab."
"It's knocked out the power," The first technician reported. "Switching to back-ups."
The room was flooded with dim red emergency lighting. It gave everything a surreal feel. It made Xavier look entirely too creepy, nailed into his chair with that helmet of his forced on. The man was still under their control, so long as the emergency generators held out though. The emergency generators would keep those mutant animals in their cells too.
"All units to the lab!" Wraith snarled into the radio. He was already running out of the room himself. Armed soldiers ran past towards the lab. There was an uncomfortable undercurrent of anxiety in the air.
It took Wraith three minutes to make it there. It might as well have taken him an hour. The lab was gone. There were fires here and there. The expensive pieces of equipment that Cornelius and his staff used to analyze and diagnose conditions in the damn muties were reduced to barely recognisable hunks of twisted smouldering metal, smashed up against the walls. The walls themselves --- thick, reinforced concrete --- were shattered, only the reinforcing steel holding them up.
Wraith stopped at the sight of the... the thing in the centre of the lab's remains. The monster seemed to burn with malevolent crimson light. Its four tails swished lazily through the air.
"N-no! S-s-stay away!!" There! Behind the beast! The doctor lying there was badly injured, probably in the explosion. He was missing both legs and his once-clean clothes were covered in blood. Wraith watched in horrified awe as the beast slashed across his chest, tearing the terrified man apart, sending half his torso flying one way and the rest of him the other.
"Open fire!" Wraith ordered, pulling his sidearm. He emptied it into the beast. The other soldiers did the same. The air filled with the sounds of gunfire.
The monster turned slowly, growling like nothing Wraith had ever heard. The bullets ripped through it, but the monster didn't even seem to notice. The damage done healed instantly. Now Wraith got a better look at it. It was definitely some kind of animal. It had large ears that stood up like a fox's. Its eyes were both facing forward and that meant it was a predator. White light spilled from its eyes and mouth, outlining a row of jagged, dangerous-looking teeth. There was something unearthly that hung in the air, an oppressive sense of dread that filled each and every one of them. It was like they were bugs about to be squashed.
The monster's eyes narrowed. It seemed to recognise Wraith. It opened its mouth wide, then wider, its jaw audibly cracking. The monster thrust its whole hand into its mouth, took hold of something, then tore it out. It looked at Wraith, then down at what was in the open palm of its clawed hand.
An implant!
That meant that this monster was one of those animals they kept caged in the basement. Ninja, Wraith realised. The monster was really Ninja. But how?! This was impossible! The procedure shouldn't have given him this power!
The monster grinned viciously, then crushed the tiny device, letting the broken pieces of plastic fall to the floor.
There was a moment's pause. Wraith realised he was holding his breath. The beast's eyes narrowed and its twisted grin widened. It launched itself at them. Wraith was faster, punching the emergency seal. An alarm sounded throughout the base, the signal to evacuate. Heavy blast doors slammed down between him and the monster. He heard the air filters start up, pumping gas into the room.
There was silence for a long moment.
Then something slammed into the door hard enough to dent the thick metal. And again! And again! The sedative gas wasn't slowing that monster down at all. If anything, the monster was getting stronger!
"Evacuate the base!" Wraith ordered.
"What are you going to do, sir?!" A frantic lieutenant asked.
"It's going to take animals to fight that thing!" Wraith responded, already sprinting down the ruined corridor towards the detention area. The soldiers scattered. Behind Wraith the heavy pounding on the doors grew louder and louder. Until it stopped.
Deathly silence settled over everything, interrupted only by the beat of the Colonel's running boots and the rush of his breathing. His heart was screaming in his ears.
And then, the beast roared.
The force-fields keeping them locked up dropped suddenly. They had all heard the commotion. They were all already standing at the very edges of their cells, trying to get some look, some idea of what was going on. The power had gone out, but the back-ups had come online too quickly for them to capitalise on it. The soldiers standing on guard down the hall had hurried away to see what was going on.
"What do you think's happening?" Iceman wondered, glancing at Rogue.
"How should I know?" Rogue asked.
"There's an awful lot of screaming goin' on," Wolverine said. He sniffed the air. Wolverine frowned. Every muscle in his body seemed to go rigid. "And gunfire."
Wraith burst into the room at a sprint, stopping only to seal the heavy blast doors behind him. He rushed right to the master control panel that controlled the force-fields. He slammed his hand into it, opening all their cells, all at once.
Wolverine rushed out immediately, ready to gut him, when he heard something chilling.
A roar on the other side of those blast doors.
"What's going on?" Cyclops demanded.
The door at the other end of the hallway buckled with a deafening clang, as though some massive force had slammed into it. The wall around the door splintered. There was another heavy clang. The door managed to hold.
"Get ready!" Wraith ordered. "It's coming!"
"What's coming?" Colossus demanded.
The door was ripped from its frame, flying end over end down the hallway. Wraith only barely managed to dive out of the way. The thick metal wreckage smashed into the wall, lodged itself there, blocking the only other exit. There was no other way out now, except through that monster.
"What the hell is that thing?!" Iceman yelled.
Cyclops opened his visor to fire a low-impact optic blast at it, but the monster barely even seemed to notice. Iceman formed a thick wall of ice between the monster and the X-Men. It swung its arm. There was a blinding explosion. It shattered the icy barrier. Shards of ice flew in every direction. Marvel Girl used her telekinesis to hold back the explosion and the dangerous shards of ice.
The monster grinned.
"We need more room to move," Cyclops said. He fired another optic blast at the monster, full power this time. It should've disintegrated anything in its path, but the monster seemed to be fighting it.
"The door!" Marvel Girl shouted. "We've got to slow it down!"
Colossus and Beast hurried over towards the heavy metal blast door, wrenching it from where it had come to rest. They hurled the scrapped door at the monster. It hit with a heavy clang, flattening the monster. It growled angrily. The door shifted. Cyclops blasted the ceiling above it. Marvel Girl saw what he was doing and reached out to help with her telekinesis. Tonnes and tonnes of reinforced concrete came crashing down on the monster.
"Did we get it?" Iceman asked hopefully.
The rubble shifted as if in response. They heard an angry growl, muffled by heavy layers of debris. "I don't think so," Colossus said.
"Everybody outside," Cyclops ordered. "Hurry!"
"Where do you think you're going?!" Wraith barked. He was holding that remote. With the push of a button, he could kill them. "You need to finish that thing while it's down!"
"We can't fight here. We've only slowed it down," Cyclops said. He gave Wraith a cold look. "Do you really want to be in here when it manages to dig its way out?"
Wraith looked worriedly at the rubble, shifting even now, like a rockslide. That monster could burst out any minute. It was going to dig his way out. It was just a matter of time. He had already seen that bullets had no effect. Like it or not, the muties were the only hope of stopping it. He nodded.
They beat a hasty retreat, through the labyrinthine corridors, finally breaking the surface. It was night out. Most of the complex was underground, a throwback to the days when weapons were conventional --- bombs dropped from planes. The ground shook. The entire complex seemed to implode in on itself.
The monster pulled itself from the rubble. It had changed. It had six tails now. It had started to form a bone-white skeleton, attached to the core of its red-black body by stretchy tendons of that same red-black tissue. The heavy feeling of dread in the air intensified. It became hard to breathe, like the very will to live was being crushed from their bodies.
The monster's eyes narrowed and its grin seemed to become broader as it looked at Rogue and Juggernaut and Wraith.
"I don't like the way it's lookin' at us..." Rogue said nervously.
"Then let's wipe that look off its face!" Juggernaut said, already running towards the monster. It watched him approach, tilting its head as if curious. It didn't seem at all scared.
"No! Don't!" Rogue shouted too late.
Juggernaut was already on top of the monster. He landed a powerful punch that seemed to send it reeling. Four of its tails impaled the ground, keeping it anchored. The monster slashed at Juggernaut in retaliation. The monster's claws gouged deep gashes through Juggernaut's chest and sent him spinning through the air. He crashed to the ground thirty feet away, his wounds bleeding profusely.
"Juggernaut!" Rogue shouted, scared. She started towards her cellmate. The monster growled menacingly, drawing her attention again. She had some basic combat training, just enough to let her get close enough to her enemy to touch. Weapon X hadn't been bothered to teach her anything more.
It wasn't even close to being enough to stand a chance against that thing. It was much faster now than it had been at only four tails. It shot forward to attack.
Nightcrawler teleported in behind her, yanking her back to safety just heartbeats before the monster's claws would have taken her head off.
The monster roared in anger.
"Let's see how you like my claws," Wolverine growled, leaping at the monster with his adamantium claws extended. Cyclops started firing at it whenever he got a shot. The other X-Men jumped in behind him.
"What is that thing?" Marvel Girl demanded.
"You think I know?!" Wraith snapped.
"Yes," Marvel Girl said. She was already reaching out, pulling the information from his memories. Her eyes widened. "No... t-that's impossible!"
"You're going to regret that," Wraith snarled. He pushed the button on the remote. Marvel Girl braced herself, but nothing happened.
"Are we late for the party?" Quicksilver asked, from where he had appeared behind Wraith. Quicksilver was around Cyclops' age. He had long silver hair. He wore a haughty smirk and a skin-tight green costume that covered his entire body uniformly.
"Just on time," Marvel Girl said.
"Abracadabra," Scarlet Witch said, holding her hand out to show a collection of implants. The X-Men's implants, Wraith realised with a start. The Witch had long, raven hair and brown eyes. She looked almost bored by the situation. She wasn't wearing much, a costume that amounted to a red bathing suit and cape, with matching accessories.
"Someone's in trouble," Toad said in a sing-song. He grinned viciously at Wraith. Toad didn't look like a toad. He was green all over, yes, but his teeth were sharp, serrated. His long black hair was pulled back by a grey bandana that matched his shirt and shorts.
The monster roared. Colossus went flying past. He smashed into the ground and had trouble getting back up.
"What the hell is that thing?!" Blob gasped, the foot-long sandwich in his hands forgotten for a moment. Blob was... well, he was a big --- as in metric tonne --- bald man with bad teeth in a wrestler's leotard.
"It's Ninja," Marvel Girl said. "They did some kind of experiment on him. That's the result."
"What?!" Iceman gasped.
"Keep him busy," Marvel Girl said.
"Easier said than done!" Iceman screamed, narrowly missing a chunk of rubble hurled his way. He created a wall of ice between them and the monster, but it might as well not have been there at all.
"We should just get out of here," Colossus said. "Let the military deal with their own mistake."
"Guns won't work on him," Marvel Girl said, shaking her head. "They wouldn't stand a chance."
"Here's a good question," Quicksilver said. "Who cares?"
"He's doing something new!" Cyclops shouted. Their attention was instantly on the monster. It had opened its mouth. There was an almost black sphere floating in front of its face. The monster's attention was on that sphere entirely, ignoring the X-Men completely. Its grin seemed to widen---
Colossus hurled a large section of broken wall at it. The monster's head was pushed to the side and its attack spun out of control.
The explosion turned night into day. It blasted past the compound wall like it wasn't even there and continued on. The explosion consumed half the mountain against which the compound was built. The devastation was so wide, no-one except Wolverine would have been able to see the other side. It was strangely directional though. Everything behind where the monster had been standing was still in ruins, but still recognisable as well.
"Holy $#!%" Toad said.
"We can't win against him..." Iceman whispered to himself, taking in the mile-wide scar.
Marvel Girl's mouth opened and closed, unable to form words. The world seemed to have frozen.
"R-Rogue..." Juggernaut gasped. Rogue turned, rushing to his side. It looked bad. It looked really bad. He was lying in an expanding pool of his own blood.
"Don't try to talk!" Rogue pleaded.
"Y-you need to..." Juggernaut coughed. Blood speckled across Rogue's face. "You need to take... take my power..."
"If I touch you, you'll die!" Rogue shouted.
Juggernaut struggled to sit up. It was hard work, even with Rogue pulling on him. "T-that thing... you have to..." He coughed. "I'm done for... Take... take my power! I-it's the only way you'll... you'll survive..."
"I can't!" Rogue said, tears coming to her eyes.
"Some of the... some of the best times of my l-life..." Juggernaut coughed. "Were spending... spending time with you... You have to survive... Please... take my power..."
Rogue's eyes went wide. She looked back at the closest thing to a friend she'd ever had. His face had lost a lot of its colour. He was dying. She closed her eyes, tears sliding down her cheeks.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
"Don't be..." Juggernaut said. He gave her a weak smile.
Rogue leaned in and kissed Juggernaut on the lips. He went limp a few moments later. Rogue stood up, a furious look on her face. "I'm going to kill it."
