A Third Path to the Future

by Vimesenthusiast

Rescued from the Negative Zone by the Fantastic Four, Harry Potter discovers he is a mutant and decides to take up the cause of equality between mutants and humans (among other causes). How will a dimensionally displaced Harry Potter, one who is extremely intelligent, proactive and not afraid to get his hands dirty effect the marvel universe? Pairings: Harry/Jean/Ororo/others pos.

39. Sinister Smacked Down

Marvel will forever belong to Stan Lee, and HP belongs to a lady over in the UK.

Apologies for the lateness of the chapter, I didn't want to post it without it being read by my beta readers, and then RL ambushed me once more the first week of July so I couldn't get it to them until the 7th. And of course, looking for small mistakes takes a long while. But this has now been beta-read by Kathryn518 and Michael Duggan. For those of you wondering, he is still looking at the last chapter, but should have it done by Wednesday.

Summary of the last chapter: The Dire Wraith's desire for a rare type of crystal that makes their magics thousands of times stronger led them into taking over Russia, eventually supplying the Russians with a weapon to create winter world-wide, a winter that unknown to them was not only not going to be turned off ever, but would also kill the spirit of the Earth, the Mother Goddess, Gaia. At the same time Russia and its ally the Mole Man launch an all out assault on all fronts. Captain America, Cyclops, and Magma led the defense of the countries around Russia, most of whom came under attack for no real strategic reason most could discern without knowing about the Dire Wraiths. At the same time, Sinister makes his moves, attempting to both kidnap Jean (only to run into a prepared Emma) and creating a civil war in Genosha, a small but extremely advanced country off the African coast. However thanks to the work of Reed Richards and the covert team lead by Mystique, he became trapped on the island. After being locked in a magical war with literal millions of Dire Wraiths, one coven against another, Harry and his allies are eventually saved by the skill and perseverance of Kitty Pryde, who uses her knowledge of the runic doorways to bring the heat of the sun to the Earth.

Freed from their magical warfare, Harry, Hela and Ororo join the battle, quickly turning the tide against the Russians as Gaia releases the power of the sun shattering the Dire Wraith's spell. With Ororo clearing the skies for them, the air power of America and others come into play after Harry has massacred the majority of the Russian's own air defense forces. Harry then aids Hela and her team of infiltrators in attacking the institute where the center for the alien coven spell was situated, draining it and through it the Dire Wraiths connected to the spell, before once more shunting much of that power into Gaia's ley lines rather than allow the massive amount of magic he had absorbed force him to ascend to godly status. Captain America and his team, aided by Dr. Strange, decisively defeat the Winter Guard, depriving the Russians of their last super-powered troop after The X-men and Harry slew the Omega Clan. With Russia now being pushed back on all fronts, Harry turns his attention to Sinister...

And now on with the climax of the war!

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Chapter 39: Sinister Smacked Down

No matter how strong a government's control of the reins of power is, there will always be internal threats. Of course, if the government was truly despotic, any opposition had to be very clandestine and circumspect, even more so when the ruling government was riding high on a wave of success. This was made worse, in a country like Russia which had not too distant memories of gulags and political opponents being jailed at the slightest provocation.

But now that Russia was facing a full reversal on nearly every front, as that news slowly trickled out to these objectors, cracks began appearing in the enforced governmental solidarity within a few hours. This was shown in a meeting taking place in Yekaterinburg, the fourth largest city in the Russian Federation.

"Are you sure you weren't followed?" asked one man, who finally stopped pacing, much to the relief of the other men in the room.

The man he spoke to, like the speaker himself, was a representative in the Duma, the Lower House of the Federal Assembly of Russia, and had been the last one to arrive. Now he smiled thinly at the pacer. "I am positive. Even our closest friends have trouble telling me and my twin apart. We have used that and this method to ditch our tails, or, in his case, his wife, numerous times."

There were some rumbles of laughter at that from the other men in the room, but they faded quickly. For a moment the room fell silent, all of them nursing large glasses of vodka or some other heavyily alcoholic drink, such was their need after the last few weeks, despite it being only around seven at night, local time.

Present at this meeting were three members of the Duma and two representatives of the Federation Council, the upper house of the Assembly. Each of them represented six or seven others who were of like mind to the men here but who were unwilling to go beyond simply talking about their current troubles.

With them was also Yekaterinburg's chief of police. He had been brought into this quasi-conspiracy by necessity, the better to keep the Federal Security Service from finding out about the meeting. Not that meeting like this was itself illegal, but such was the air of politics in Russia today that any attempt at even constructive opposition was bound to bring down a nasty response. That had been going on long before the war actually began, but even the the men present here hadn't realized how bad it might become until it was too late.

Yet, even with that, they and their allies in the assemblies knew that Russia was no stranger to oligarchs or tyrants. Such things would pass, and Russia would endure. But this war, if what my agents in the military are reporting is true, this war makes no sense, nor does the way we've gone about it, thought one of those men, a man named Alexei. He said so aloud, looking around at the others and leaning back, sipping at his vodka and crossing his legs as he put them on the table in front of him, the picture of a man at his ease, though his eyes were hard and narrow as he looked at them all. "What do your sources tell you of the way this war is going since that blasted King Winter weapon was destroyed?"

King Winter was the term the Russian government had used to sell the idea of having weaponized winter and used it against their enemies. All the men here had been very concerned about that and had doubted that such a weapon, one that effected so much of the world's ecosystems, could ever be 'turned off' as easily as the president and his cabinet had implied. And even for Russia, the results of an endless ice age would have been catastrophic.

"Much the same as yours, I have no doubt," another Duma representative confessed. His name was Konstantin, and he was the youngest one there by a good seven years or so. He was also a former military man and had retained a great number of military contacts when he went into politics.

"Our air forces on the European continent are just gone, wiped out," he went on bluntly. "We still have air forces in Asia but transporting those jets to where they could be of use is going to take a lot in terms of logistics, a logistical flexibility we no longer have. The so-called Allies have been on the move all day, gentlemen, and with their superiority in the air, I do not think we can stop them short of the borders."

"It is worse than that," said another man. His name was Leonid, and he was actually one of the most well-placed of all of the people here, having formerly been on the Federal Assembly's oversight for internal affairs. He no longer retained that position, having stepped down due to ill health a few months ago, but there was nothing wrong with his mind, and a lot of his connections were still in place, both within the government and without.

"Belorussia is very close to openly revolting, gentlemen," he went on calmly. "They were not pleased to be used as a jumping-off point for the invasion of Poland and have seen the majority of their local military forces ground under in this war already. I have it on good authority that if the president tries to order up the reserves, Belorussia will not only not obey, but the reserves to be brought up there will take up arms against any attempt at enforcing that order, while reaching out to the Allies, and Poland in particular, for peace talks. No one there wants to face Captain America in battle or the implications of doing so."

There were some grunts of humor at that, but there was sober reflection too. While he was primarily a symbol of Americanism, the 'Mom's apple pie, baseball,' and all that traditional 'American way' crap, Captain America remained a symbol of…well, good. The good fight, the righteous war, the human way. Even among Russians that kind of sentimentality was powerful, especially after he helped the Red Guardian in World War II against the Red Skull, Baron Strucker, and the Master Man and their armies for a time before the Allies launched their own invasion of Europe. When he had shown up again, alive after so long, even Russia had been surprised and elated at the return of such a hero. To face him on the opposite side was telling to the common solider, and even these men, jaundiced politicians all, were not immune to that.

"Why was the war even launched?" asked the police chief, scowling. "That is a question that a lot of people at the municipal level have been asking, as we have been dealing with numerous calls for more information and a growing call for peace, up to parades and rallies. We have asked numerous times for some level of compromise, but all we get from the government is an order to suppress any such."

He let a small sneer cross his face then. "We see it in the news, we see these stories about our fellow Slavs in Poland, Finland, the Ukraine, and so forth being abused. We see it, and we know to take it as half-truths at best, a return to the Stalin way of conquest at worst. Why?! What could possibly be worth this, making an enemy of the rest of the world, launching our armies like so many daggers at our neighbors' throats, using that cold weapon! I do not mind telling you, gentlemen, that that King Winter thing terrified me, and I am glad it has been broken."

"That is the odd thing," said Leonid, pushing his small, spare, wire glasses up his nose as he spoke. "As far as common military men go, there has been no actual objective to any of our attacks beyond the one in Asia, which succeeded. Instead the army groups were simply ordered to attack across the border with no clear goals or rules."

"For my part I heard some strange reports about mining equipment and field engineers on the Finland front being seconded to some strange top-secret project. One that was separate from the military and the military command structure," said another man, who came from Leningrad. "Is that not strange? And the Omega clan were also removed from the regular military command, but they have not reported in since yesterday. And I recently learned that several of my old friends who looked into that have, since, themselves gone missing."

"What about the tunnels?" asked one of the men who had been silent since he entered the room. Aleksandr was a current member of the Oversight for Public Works. "Do we know where they came from? They were reported in the news, but that was the first I've heard of it, and I've seen no reports about how they were created and when. And I have been threatened to stay silent instead of searching out further information."

"What is going on in this country?" groaned Konstantin, leaning back in his chair and putting a hand over his eyes wearily. "Are we really back to the days where one hand doesn't know what the other is doing, and either could be executed at the drop of a hat?! There is a reason why we stepped away from communism, my friends!"

"The president and his cabinet," Leonid said musingly, while Aleksandr nodded next to them. "They are after something, and perhaps the generals all understand the importance of whatever they were after. But whatever it is, we didn't seize it, and we are now retreating on all fronts. This is worrisome."

"Worrisome! Please!" the police chief barked a laugh. "Worrisome is finding that you have bought watered down vodka rather than the real thing. This is an unmitigated disaster."

"Yes," said Aleksandr, his voice calm. "It is. But what are we going to do about it?"

Leonid shook his head. "What can we do about it at this point? Nothing, nothing until we know what's going on. And even then we'll have to figure out some way of getting the word out. We are all known as opposing the war, and even now, with the war turning against us, that information has yet to reach the public where it could defend us. Our positions are very tenuous."

"That is the problem of being a state in which the state runs every media outlet," said one of them.

"Bite your tongue. If we allowed for free press, we would be no better than the Americans or the British or, heaven forbid, the French!"

There were some chuckles at that bit of humor since most of these men did agree with the fact that the government needed to be the one running the media. Media outlets attacking the government or invading people's personal lives was something no one wanted to see, if only because that last was a prerogative that should be reserved for the government.

"Nonetheless, what do we do?" asked the police chief.

"We look for clues; we push for more information on how the various fronts are doing. We need concrete things: numbers, wounded, objectives taken or lost. We grind the fact that this war didn't really have a goal as far as we can tell into the rest of the Duma's faces until they are forced to agree with it. Now that we are losing, we should make headway. After that, we will see."

OOOOOOO

Harry blasted through the air so fast that his passage would have made a jet look slow, yet he was somehow not leaving an audible boom behind him. When he thought about it, Harry put this down to the fact that he was using magic to propel him through the air, and magic, at its very bedrock, was supposed to defy natural laws as most people understood them. At the moment, however, his thoughts were not on his passage but on the events of the day, his mind burdened, almost weary, and not even with the revelations about the Dire Wraiths and their quisling human allies. No, what Harry was thinking about, brooding about, really, were his own actions earlier that day.

It wasn't every day, after all, that you became a mass murderer in the space of single afternoon. I know that it had to be done intellectually, but emotionally is another matter. It had been Harry who had made the call that, to force Russia to the negotiation table, the Russians had to be shown they could not win. They had to be dealt a turnaround so abrupt and violent, and further, so visible to the masses, that there would be no chance they could come back from it or hide what had occurred from the Russian public. That didn't make it any easier to stomach the fact that Harry had coldly decided to annihilate several thousand Russian soldiers who, from their own perspective, were just doing their duty.

As Harry sped over the Mediterranean, his thoughts were interrupted in a most pleasant manner by seeing Ororo in the air in front of him, having somehow figured out his route from the secret base near Stalingrad. Of course, this actually didn't take much planning on Ororo's part. She had simply drawn a line between where the Dire Wraith's headquarters for their magical assault was to Genosha, off the coast of Africa.

Now she smiled at him, and Harry found himself slowing down automatically. The two of them came together, linking hands as they flew through the air for a moment together, making light loops around one another. Ororo then leaned in and kissed him, and Harry smiled against her lips, feeling his earlier mental weariness leaving him. Being around Ororo somehow reinvigorated him mentally and physically in a way that absorbing so much magic from the Planetary Soul Constrictor had not been able to. "I love you, my lady," he said aloud as they pulled back from the kiss.

Ororo smiled winsomely at Harry before kissing him once again, then pulled back. "I know. Gaia also told me you had turned down godhood again. God Potter: it doesn't have a very good ring to it, does it?" she quipped before becoming serious. "Still, we have come to know Hela, so we know gods are not, technically speaking, all that godly."

That was a bit of an understatement considering that, of his current lovers, Ororo was the one who was closest to Hela. The African born weather witch viewed the Asgardian goddess of Death as another sister wife, even if they hadn't actually slept together.

Harry winced a little. "It's true, I suppose, that gods like the Asgardians aren't all that different from people like you and me. However, there is a difference between that and gods like Gaia and that magic one, Balthakk. Or gods like the Vishanti, who Stephen calls on for some of his magical spells. When this came up after I absorbed Balthakk's powers from his gem, something told me that the change would be much more profound than simply becoming an Asgardian would be, for example. You know how I became stronger and faster after absorbing the yellow gem's power, and I can tell I've gotten a similar power up now. But there was a moment back then, and another one just now, when, when my emotions didn't register, when I could feel what I would term my humanity slipping away."

He fell silent then, scowling and looking away. "I am afraid about how it would change me to make that leap. Would I become like Hela and the Asgardians, powerful but, generally speaking, still human? Or would I become like the gods of magic are supposed to be, omniscient in their sphere but disconnected from everything? Forced into separate dimensions, only able to interact with this world through avatars and creations like the Juggernaut?"

Turning back, Harry let his arms, which had been around her Ororo's shoulders, shift down her body to rest on her hips, pressing their bodies together as they slowly revolved around one another in midair, staring into Ororo's eyes. "I want to hold my and Jean's children as a man. I want to be with you as a man, have a family with all of you, give our children a home as a man. No matter how many other demands on my time I might have decided to take on," he said with a chuckle. "I want to do it my way, not be forced into a, a preexisting mold by the universe."

Ororo smiled at that and then leaned forward and kissed him ardently, putting all of her emotions into the kiss before slowly, rather regretfully, leaning back. "I am not arguing your decision, my love. I just wanted to make certain you understood why it was a good idea," she said, turning back to the conversation as if her kiss had not happened. "Worship is not all it's cracked up to be either. Hela and I have talked about it. The God System, she calls it, a system of worship and belief feeding the gods' power to a certain extent. But at the same time it makes even her fit a certain mold. Hela can shuck it off when not dealing with worshipers, but, as she has dealt with worshipers since coming here, Hela's found it somewhat constraining."

She leaned back out of their embrace to gently poke Harry in the chest. "And she has a very specific portfolio, a specific task and place in her pantheon, one which she was born into. You, Harry, would be ascending to godhood. I don't know what would happen to you because of that, but the best we could hope for would be that you would be forced to become what Gaia called once a Sky Father, a male head of a Pantheon."

"And while I can see you and the others being goddesses to my god rather easily, being the big head in the sky doesn't really interest me," Harry said dryly. This caused Ororo to roll her eyes, smacking his chest with one hand lightly, though she was smiling as she did it.

But before she could reply verbally, both of them felt a change in the air around them. Everything seemed to stop as a single moment was stretched out to infinity, the feel of the wind around them halting and the sound of distant birds stopping, as below them the Mediterranean slowed to a stop.

A moment later the lady Gaia stood there, clad in a new guise, one that took both Harry and Ororo aback, causing them to stare at her in shock. She smiled at them, bringing the feeling of spring into this endless moment over the Mediterranean: the smell, the feeling, almost, of green grass underneath their feet, birdsong, and the blue sky above distracting them somewhat from her new form.

And when she spoke, Gaia didn't seem to notice their shock, instead addressing her words towards their current conversation.

That was the sort of feeling her smile gave them both, and Harry could feel his weariness, what bit of it Ororo's mere presence hadn't dissipated, disappear entirely. "You are wise beyond knowing, Harry Potter," she said, one finger tapping his chest and then Ororo's lovingly. "You would indeed become a god of magic. There is no place within the local system as created by He Who Stands Above All for another Sky Father."

Then she laughed gaily, twirling away to put a tiny bit of distance between the three of them, her bare feet kicking off the air underneath while creating more of that green grass smell. "But if you keep pumping me full of vitality like this, Harry Potter, I will force you to take responsibility!"

Since Gaia was currently wearing the form a teenage girl, perhaps about fourteen or so, that caused Harry to hold up his hands as if warding away a disaster, while Ororo burst out into giggles. Her body type was that of a hearty farm girl with a bit of the milkmaid archetype thrown in. Her skin was tanned to a light brown color, and she was wearing a pair of jeans over wide hips with a t-shirt that strained to contain her chest. This was so removed from her normal matronly appearance that Ororo simply had to ask, "Lady Gaia, why do you look like…um, that?"

Gaia laughed and pointed at Harry. "Because of him! What do you think I meant when I said I would force him to take responsibility?"

At that Harry gulped, looking over at Ororo, who was also looking at him speculatively, but thankfully with the gleam of humor in her eyes as Gaia continued. "As I said, you pumped me so full of your Harry that I feel younger and more vibrant than I have in millennia." She sobered slightly then. "But because of that power I was able to reverse the impact of what would otherwise have been an extinction level event."

At Harry's look of shock, Gaia waved her hand airily. "Oh, not for you humans, but you are not the only species I have given birth to. No, the cold was worse for animals, ranging from birds to bugs and small animals. The lizards and snakes, in particular, were hard hit, and despite my best efforts I know we lost at least fourteen, maybe as many as thirty-six different species of bugs and reptiles combined thanks to the cold. Still, because of the added magic you pumped into me, I was able to keep hundreds of species alive that would otherwise have died. The assault of winter the aliens launched against my body has far had far-reaching consequences, much of which Ororo and I will be busy trying to put right for days."

Ororo nodded, moving past the surprise of her goddess's current physical body for a moment. "Even now, half of my attention is concentrating on that. I won't be joining you in the combat against Sinister or his people."

"You don't need to," Harry said with a shrug, his hands flickering with all the lights of the rainbow for a moment. "Even if my current power up turns out to not be enough for some reason, Hela will be along with the others shortly. I think at this point we are done with Russia. We can leave Steve to help on that front with his team while we turn our own attention, the Custodes Mundi's attention, to Sinister and putting him down like the dog he is. Still," he went on with a sigh, "It's depressing to hear you'll be busy with that. I hoped after Sinister was dealt with all of us could take a well-deserved few days off."

"Don't be a child," Gaia said sternly, her young-seeming form not at all matching her current tone. Indeed, it was rather jarring for both her listeners. "The battles might be over by that point, but that does not mean your work will be finished. And you know that. Wallowing in self-pity does no one any good."

"I wasn't wallowing," Harry said primly, looking away. "I was… I was simply dipping my toe in the pool of self-pity, certainly not wallowing there," Harry said, trying to look offended and failing.

This caused both Ororo and Gaia to laugh, and Harry smiled back at them, his earlier morose attitude over having basically killed so many people in an afternoon leaving him for now. It might come back in the dark of night, but for now he could set it aside as the necessity it had been.

"But do you need more magic?" he asked Gaia. "You were saying that it helped, and I think I could give you a bit more and still have near to full reserves when I face Sinister."

Gaia laughed gaily once more, shaking her head before running her hands down her teenage body as she grinned at him. "Are you so eager to thrust your magic into my body again?" she asked coquettishly.

The mix of her current teenage body and the knowing, almost sinful, look she was giving him caused Harry to stutter a moment before shaking his head and once more holding his hands up in surrender. "I'm just going to stop now."

That caused Gaia to laugh again. "No, Harry Potter, I do not need more magical power. At this moment all I need is time and attention, and as a goddess I have both. Ororo's attention on the weather patterns will allow me to handle everything else that needs to be done to keep things going." She then sobered, her tone and face showing a new level of seriousness. "But I did not come here only to reiterate what you already sensed somehow, but to tell you that you are dangerously close to crossing a line, whatever you do."

She frowned, pouting almost as she raised a finger to her lips in thought. "The world as we know it, o,r rather, the universe, is no longer young. It could not sustain a creature who embodies as much magical power as you were about to become without straining. There are rules that we all must follow; the system exists to keep gods from affecting the physical realm much around them. That is why my ability to affect even my own ecosphere is constrained, why I was so delighted when Ororo was born and then again when she became my chosen champion. You would be, as I said, forced into the mold of a god of magic.

"Emotions would become a distant memory, your connections to this world as Harry Potter, the individual, would be severed. Oh, what you have done would remain, and people would know you and your deeds. In that manner you would be well placed to be worshiped as a new god of magic, with thousands of believers worldwide. Indeed, you would probably have to fight the other gods of magic for a place because your ascension would force them aside. And whenever you won, you would become stronger, but more disconnected from the material plane, from the wants and desires of a human being. Magic is tricky like that. What you call magic is basically the stuff of chaotic change on the molecular level changed into energy."

Gaia paused then before reaching forward with one hand to grab Harry's chin, holding his gaze with her own. "But, Harry Potter, you have denied yourself godhood more than once now. Be very careful. The system exists," she repeated her earlier phrase, "and it does not like anomalies. Keep your power merely to that of a regular god like young Hela, and you will have no issue. Keep it at its current level, and you will be straining the limits of what is allowed but can get away with it, for now, much like that mad Titan you fought gets away with being as powerful as he is. But let it rise further than it is now, and you will no longer have the option to bow out of this 'great honor.'"

There was something in Gaia's tone, and Harry blinked, cocking his head to one side as he looked back at her thoughtfully. She seemed to realize that she had given away a little too much there and shook herself, smiling at him. "Remember that, Harry Potter. Until next time." With that Gaia's presence disappeared, and the stretched out feeling of the moment evaporated with her, leaving the two lovers flying on together over a Mediterranean that was once more moving and alive.

"Well," Harry said after a moment, forcing his tone to be light, "it's always nice to have my suspicions confirmed, anyway. But can we turn to more practical matters now?" The idea of being separated from his life here, not just his physical form, but his life with the others, his connections to the physical plane, terrified him something fierce. But, at the same time, Gaia had mentioned Thanos, and Harry knew there were other deific powers out there which were not themselves gods, like Galactus. Perhaps, perhaps there is another way forward there, to have the power of a god on that level without being forced into the mold. But it is something I need to examine very, very carefully and at length.

"What can you tell me about the war?" he asked aloud in an effort to move past such thoughts. As he had been busy with Hela and infiltrating, and then before that devastating the Russian Air Force, Harry had not kept up with the events of the last half day or so. In fact, he had lost track of time entirely somewhere along the line, shifting from one time zone to another, a trend that continued now with this cross-continent flight.

Despite his light tone, Ororo could easily tell Harry was rattled at the moment and went along with the change of topic with a certain amount of eagerness herself. "Since you are heading into the small island, I shall begin there. T'challa is once more in charge of that front, but there is scant headway being made there. This new telepath that Sinister has somehow spun out of whole cloth is forcing our forces to fight a defensive war, even with Emma and Charles both aiding them. As I understand it, defending minds like that is far tougher than attacking them."

"Defense is often harder than attacking in a siege. You have to be strong everywhere, whereas the enemy only needs to feint to one side, then attack in another direction. Plus, they can coordinate with the rest of Sinister's forces to take advantage of any headway made on the physical plane," Harry said with a shrug. "But so long as we're not losing people or our foothold on Genosha in the port, we can reverse that trend easily."

"The fight in the Caucuses has bogged down, literally. Mud and lack of roads and destroyed bridges is slowing everyone down as we fight through territory the Russians took in their initial push. Every general I've talked to says it will be days be before the Russians get over their shock at the sudden reversal, and there's no sign of our control of the skies being challenged thanks to you and your efforts, but both their retreat and the Allies' push after them will continue to move slowly."

Harry nodded grim satisfaction at that.

"The SAS and other special forces are to be dropped behind enemy lines tonight. Their missions, as far as I have been told, is to disrupt the logistics and communication lines in Russian territory as well as perform decapitation strikes on enemy generals. The one mission I know the SAS has that the others do not is to try and find every tunnel and tunnel entrance they can."

"Ah," Harry winced, thinking for a moment before nodding. There wasn't anything he could do about calling those special forces back, and, despite the fact he felt the Russians as a while had been duped into this war, they were still at war for now. Generals and others were legitimate targets. "Did the warning about the Dire Wraiths and how badly they've infiltrated the Russian government and military get out?"

"Indeed, but are they bullet proof?" Ororo asked.

"Not unless they have time to throw up a shield, I don't think," Harry said.

"And if they do, they reveal themselves to the humans around them," Ororo said. "You did right in leaving most of the people at the Institute of Parallel Thought alive and having those two guards involved in the questioning of Dr. Volkh."

She shivered, shaking her head, and Harry looked at her quizzically. "Gaia told me that if any human had been involved in this, she would have demanded their soul from whatever religion they believed in. And Hela's report said that this man was a communist?"

"Something of the sort. A communist like Stalin rather than those who came before him, although in terms of their views on religion there isn't much difference: religion is the opiate of the masses or whatever it was."

"Exactly. Thus, he will have no defense when he dies. Gaia will claim his soul, and for what he helped to cause…" She shivered. "We have only seen Gaia in her nominal guise as the mother. But winter too is her rightful domain, and she can be as cold as the Arctic and just as unforgiving."

Harry nodded, stroking his chin thoughtfully, though he had scant sympathy for Volkh. Instead his mind was on the rest of what she said. "I think it's time to unleash Sage," he said with a grim little smile. "Pull her off of the logistics aspect and tell her to assign everything she's been doing in terms of the EDF or Magical Minds to someone else."

Since joining them, Sage, or Tessa, had taken on more and more of the day to day organization of the various aspects of Harry's growing power base. The fact that she didn't need sleep and had a mental capacity greater than most computer networks helped immensely. In return Harry made certain she had everything she wanted, from the latest greatest computers, to hard light technology, to installing her favorite coffee and donut store in the first floor of the Magical Minds Headquarters—which had an overall positive effect on his workers' morale, if not their waistlines—and she was easily the most highly paid individual on his roster. Even Ororo and Jean were not paid nearly as much money, though they had, technically speaking, more authority.

"Tony has his own JARVIS and the actual humans involved now on the ball in terms of the logistics side of things, right?"

Ororo thought for a moment, then nodded. With Hela and Harry out of communication, it had fallen to her to communicate with their allies, and she had taken that aspect on after retreating from her role in the aerial assault up the Caucuses. "Except for the hover retrofits. Those were bogging down, but I believe that Dr. Doom has agreed to send construction droids into Poland and then sent down a shipment to Turkey. Those will have cost the Turkish government and the rest of the allies quite a lot, and Georgia and Azerbaijan will probably be in his debt for decades after this is over given their low GDP if he decides to release them to help rebuild after the war. But yes, we can do that. What do you want Sage to be doing instead?"

"I want her to attack the Russian propaganda machine and its news networks. Russia has never been an open society as America or the UK would understand the term, so the government was possibly able to keep the sudden reversal from the news, and, more importantly, we know they were able to feed the public enough bunk to get them behind the war in the first place. But the Russian people need to know about what is going on in the war, about why it was begun, and about the Dire Wraiths. They need to be turned against the war in no uncertain terms."

Ororo frowned but nodded thoughtfully. "We don't want to invade Russia."

"Exactly. We can't conquer Russia. Defeat it in war, yes, and we've already begun that process. But conquer it? No. Russia would have been difficult to invade at the best of times. With all the tunnels that they used to ship troops to the front without anyone being the wiser, that aspect has been tripled. We can't take the time, effort, or pay the lives to invade Russia, and, besides," he said with a sigh, "the common man on the street doesn't know anything about the reasons behind this war, doesn't know why it was launched. All they know is what their government tells them. They no doubt know to take that with a grain of salt, and I'll wager that even in the government there were a lot of people against this war. Once the secret of the Dire Wraiths are forced out into the open, I hope to see those, call them those moderates, taking a center stage."

"It will be very hard to keep that from becoming a witch hunt," Ororo warned before nodding. "Still, I'll pass that on to Sage."

"Further," Harry went on, "I want to split up the teams more now that the Winter Guard have been mostly eliminated. I'll radio Danielle, Lance, and Wyatt to pull back. We'll second them to the Fantastic Four for their hunt for the Mole Man's impostor. Remove him, and the Subterraneans won't fight further in this war. Maybe afterwards we can even negotiate with them.

"Magma, Psylocke, Husk, and Colossus should join the team already in place in Genosha. I'll tell Thunderbird that it has nothing to do with his leadership, though," he said with a scowl. "He's done the best he was able to under trying circumstances, but if nothing else, we need more firepower there to keep order after I remove Sinister."

"With extreme prejudice, I hope," Ororo quipped while also nodding.

"Oh yes, you can take that to the bloody bank, love," Harry said with a smile before turning back to the matter at hand. "Steve will retain command of the team left in Poland, of course, since I'll wager that will be the front that opens up fastest thanks to Dr. Doom's involvement in the retrofitting process. In contrast, the X-Men will pull back entirely, since I doubt they'll be needed up in Finland any longer. Although maybe we'll leave Logan and his daughter in place. They can hunt behind enemy lines for these Dire Wraiths. Hmm… Shift Iceman, if he still is good to fight, to Steve's command too. I'll wager he'll be of more use there than anywhere else. Can you ask Reed to send Steve a few of those devices that he made, and two for Logan and his daughter?"

"I can, or perhaps we could simply send Garm to join Wolverine," Ororo said, still trying to add a bit of humor to the discussion so that Harry wouldn't backslide. "After his experience in your assault on that research facility, I have no doubt he'll be able to sniff them out regardless of their form."

Harry laughed. "Yes, that would be a good idea if we wanted to terrify everyone on both sides of that war, since I've no doubt both the Finns and the Russians have legends of giant wolf monsters. But for now I think that's all of the micromanaging I can do," he finished with a self-deprecating chuckle.

Ororo laughed with him but then kissed him, hard, her hands descending to grasp on his buttocks as she opened her mouth, allowing Harry's tongue access in a long, tongue-twirling kiss before pulling away. "I will see you after this," she said fiercely. "And whatever our other obligations, I will claim a bit of time of our own Harry Potter, all of us."

"Oh yeah," Harry said with a sigh, pulling back from this kiss very reluctantly. "That is one idea I can most definitely get behind, love." But alas, after that both lovers had to back away, with Ororo floating to one side and Harry resuming his journey towards Genosha. They both still had work to do.

OOOOOOO.

It was perhaps the most horrible of ironies that, while Gaia was talking to Harry and Ororo about extinction level events, the Dire Wraiths were actually dealing with one, but, for them, it wasn't about their local ecology but their own species. The halls, streets, and buildings scattered all across Direhome, the Dire Wraiths' one planet, had slowly become silent as more and more of their population were joined to the ongoing magical assault via the Planetary Soul Constrictor. But after Harry's returning strike, that silence had shifted to that of the grave.

Not even Samantha had known how many billions of her people had been ordered to take part of that side of things. More than two-thirds of her entire species had been pulled from everything else they did to take part of this attack. Food production, technology, education, construction, governmental duties, everything and anything that a society needed to run had slowly ground to a halt, the Dire Wraiths' desire for the Ocetite overpowering everything else. Those gems and the power they represented to the Dire Wraiths was like a drug, a siren song to their whole race. The idea of obtaining a planet's worth of Ocetite had blinded them to everything else.

Thousands had suffered the equivalent of a magical aneurysm when Harry had allowed the power of the sun to flood into the ley lines of the Earth. But billions had still been living and connected to the coven spell, unable to pull themselves out. Though each in turn had been badly drained of their magic already, Harry's later draining attack had finished them off.

Of those who had still been connected to the crystal, less than half had survived, and of those not one retained their magic, their ability to shape shift. With that they lost the ability to survive in the harsh realities of the nexus that their planet was situated within. Many of those, the ones who had joined the coven later in its assault, were simply comatose but might recover in time. Others, others were simply dead, their bodies turned to ash, their minds unable to sustain the shock of having their magic snuffed out like candles under the power of Harry's mutant power and his will. The Dire Wraith society, such as it was, might survive, but it would take centuries, perhaps, to rebuild their numbers and their society to an equal level.

Now the survivors could only stare around them in growing horror. Whatever they had hoped to gain, it most decidedly could never have been worth the price their society had just paid. And with that understanding more than one remaining government official decided never again to mess with Earth. The cost of it was simply far too high. Indeed, if they had had the power they might well have removed their existing spies to aid in rebuilding at home. But they couldn't. Those spies were on their own.

OOOOOOO

After flying over a large portion of the African continent, Harry once more hit open ocean, but only for about ten minutes at his current flight speed, having slowed down tremendously. He had spent much of that time calling ahead. It wouldn't do for him to be shot at after passing through the United States Navy's cordon around the island and cancel his invisibility spell; it would be undiplomatic.

I have enough people worried about what my magic can do already, and that number's going to rise after the news of this day has time to really percolate. No need to make the good men and women of the US Navy even more paranoid than they already are, Harry thought to himself.

So it was that Harry flew over the defensive formation of four light cruisers, each leading a group of destroyers. He saw most of the destroyers sitting a little closer to the shoreline and the others moving around at a set distance from them and the island, with the cruisers behind them, covering their smaller brethren and the distant shore. And, by the one real port, a heavy cruiser sat, its guns pointed towards the island but silent. Genosha hadn't had a navy to speak of, and, astonishingly, only a few ships had tried to leave, and all of them bar one had turned back when ordered to.

But then he was over the port city, whose name, Harry reflected, he probably should learn at some point in the next two hours. Descending towards the ground, he saw numerous anti-air installations here and there, all of them operated by Wakandans.

As he landed he was greeted by T'challa, his mask pushed back to reveal his face. The two men clasped hands, and Harry looked the African king up and down, "Huh, not even a limp. Why it's almost like…"

"Don't finish that line, Potter," the king said with a mock growl, shaking his head. "You're not nearly as funny as you think you are."

Harry laughed, which T'challa joined after a second before leading Harry off deeper into the city through a series of strip-mall-like areas towards the front. "How is it going here?" Harry asked, gesturing around them.

"We are being pressed hard," the Black Panther admitted. "The Mutant Liberation Front is to our south. They are pressing in on the ground occasionally, but it's in the Northwest that the so-called Press Gang is pushing us harder. It also brought up a lot more of those high-tech toys of theirs: the robots that they have to drive, energy guns, and, for some reason, capture nets. Energy nets that act like an overpowered taser. But it's their numbers and organization that make them more dangerous than the MLF, at least without Sinister or his lieutenant Arclight involved."

"How much of their forces do you think they've pushed into the city?" Harry asked, his eyes narrowed in thought.

The Black Panther paused at that, then quickly got onto the command data net with his people before replying. "I think the Press Gang has pushed most of its troops into the city since the MLF aren't attacking them anymore. The Mutant Liberation Front itself… They're so disorganized…"

Black Panther paused. "No, that isn't the correct word. They are compartmentalized. Each group operates under a different local commander and very rarely operates with any of the others. When they do it can be devastating, but they don't normally work in more than six or seven teams at a time. It makes for deadly guerrilla warfare and is giving my people fits, almost as much as the fact that a lot of them are bulletproof. I don't suppose you could see yourself giving us some more energy weapons?"

"We've already handed out quite a lot of those, both to you and the various Russian fronts, so that would be a no," Harry replied dryly. The Black Panther shrugged as if to say, 'Can't blame me for trying,' and Harry went on. "And I know that you've reverse engineered at least a few bits of those before their safety runes exploded."

Though he wasn't as blindly optimistic about it as Tony Stark, Harry didn't want to see the proliferation of energy or gauss weaponry. Hover technology, he was more than willing to let that be copied regardless of it being under a patent. But weapons, no. That particular genie would remain in the bottle as long as he could keep it there, at least in large amounts.

Still, Magical Minds had given out literally thousands of those weapons to troopers worldwide, and Harry knew that, troopers being troopers, there would be a lot of attempts to figure out how they worked. And still other attempts by army officers or government officials who wanted to have their own source of such weapons.

I wonder how many of the weapons I've gotten reports about exploding were because some too-clever trooper has decided to try and get around the security despite warnings to the contrary, or some idiot government has ordered the attempt. Given the extenuating circumstances, Harry was willing to not go through with his threat and cut the parent country of those troopers off from the rest of Magical Mind's products, but that didn't mean he what was going to let any of them figure out ways to create similar weapons if he could help it. I probably can't stop it from happening at this point, especially since the Russians developed energy weapons on their own, as did the Chinese, but my efforts can at least slow that kind of thing down for a bit.

"Still," Harry said, returning to the here and now as he looked at the Black Panther thoughtfully, "you're very certain that most of the Press Gang is in the city."

"Those robots of theirs are actually easy to track. Their energy signatures are quite distinctive, and, despite the mental assault that Diamond and Professor X are dealing with, we've been able to continually track enemy movement outside of the city. Inside of the city, with all the concrete, steel, and buildings, it's far more difficult, but Genosha is relatively regimented. Out past the suburbs it quickly becomes less developed, and our low-flying recon drones have lately begun to give us more information like that than before. I know they've pushed in at least four hundred of those giant robots, and if they routinely put one of those with two squads of regular troopers…" T'challa shrugged. "That should be a goodly portion of their military."

Harry nodded. The Wakandan recon drones were extremely advanced little models, almost equal to something that Dr. Doom or Reed Richards would've come up with, and had exteriors of vibranium, making them difficult to destroy. It was a reminder to Harry that, whatever their ongoing personal issues with one another, the Black Panther had a scientific and industrial base he might do well to tap in the future.

But that doesn't mean I'm going to invite him to my wedding with Ororo, whenever that actually occurs, the wizard thought with some amusement. Not that he blamed the man for his infatuation with Harry's Nubian goddess, but the fact that the Black Panther did, according to Emma, at least, still hold a bit of a candle for Ororo despite the woman putting him down in no uncertain terms did bother Harry even if the man was unwilling to get between them.

"Still, if you're certain that the Press Gang has mostly concentrated into the city, that gives us an opportunity to defeat the majority of their forces in detail," he said aloud, not letting any of those last few thoughts show on his face or in his voice.

"I don't see how," Black Panther said bluntly. "My men are worn down, we lack the heavy weapons necessary to fight groups of those robots, and my Rules of Engagement, rules I came up with, I might add, forbids us from devastating the city in this fight, whereas theirs quite blatantly do not. Your men have performed incredibly well to help us hold the line, but even with you here I don't see any way to create the swift reversal you seem to be saying we should."

"I'm proud of the way Thunderbird and the others have performed. But you really should have realized something when he first arrived. Since this war began, the Custodes Mundi have mostly been operating without their big guns," Harry said with a smirk. "Hela, myself, Ororo, and Phoenix. And when it comes to clearing this city, heh. You might want to call your troops, warn them they're about to get some help and not to be alarmed at the giant creatures of stone and concrete appearing around them."

Before T'challa could do more than blink, Harry knelt down to place his hands on the concrete of the street that they were currently walking down. "Shi Jundai!" Harry said coldly, pulsing a portion of his power into the spell and the ground around him.

The Black Panther gasped at the sight of hundreds, then thousands, of clay, stone, and concrete golems shifted out of the ground, their very bulk slowly obscuring how far the spell had spread, filling in the roads all around them and then on in every direction. They stood there like so many dozens of soldiers, turning towards Harry and staring as if waiting for him to give them orders.

Harry gestured towards the northeast of the city with one hand, using the other to point to a nearby group of the Black Panther's soldiers in their odd traditional African tribesman garb. "Help the people that are dressed like this and fight the people to the north of here who are on top of giant metal golems like yourselves and those with them."

As one the golems raised stone swords in a salute before turning and marching off. T'challa stared after them for a moment, but then he was on his radio, contacting all of his men and the marines which had recently arrived to aid them, telling them not to worry about the golems now streaming towards the north of the city.

And there were many, many more that neither man could see at present. Harry's spell had basically transformed six or seven city blocks in a circle around him into a literal army of golems. It was about to be a very bad day for the Press Gang.

T'challa held his headset away from his head as a woman somewhere on the line started to shout at him in Wakandan, and Harry smiled at him in as innocent a manner as he could contrive. "Will that help, do you think?"

"If they don't just retreat. I certainly would if I saw that coming at me," the Black Panther said with a chuckle, gesturing at the slowly disappearing forms of the golems as they marched off into the city. The fact that a lot of them looked like The Thing amused him tremendously, but he wasn't about to comment on that to Harry Potter. No, I'll save that for when Ben is around. That'll be much more amusing. Although the ease with which he did that, that's somewhat concerning. How powerful is Ororo's paramour, really?

"I can do something about that too," Harry said with a chuckle.

With that Harry flew back up into the sky, stopping when he could look down and see the entire city, then he thrust out his hands in a downward direction. "Sciath na Bhféadfadh!" he intoned, creating the same kind of energy shield that he had used to contain the Solus Perdito spell with which he'd destroyed the Air Force bases in Russia. He found it somewhat ironic in a morbid sort of way that now he was using that same spell, a spell he'd used to limit the damages his other spell had done, to contain a portion of the enemy in order to wipe them out.

As thousands of people throughout the city looked up astonishment, a wall of golden and blue energy began to rise from all sides, meeting in a dome above them, completely blocking off the city. That shield was reinforced by two more shield spells of different colors, and then Harry clenched his hands into fists, concentrating as he reached out and forced the three energy shields into a single magical edifice. With that done, Harry descended to the ground, cocking an eyebrow at the Black Panther. "Will that do?"

"Now I know you're trying to show off," T'challa huffed, and Harry laughed, shrugging his shoulders. "Really, I just want all this finished." His face turned grim as he spoke. "I want this finished as soon as damn near possible, and I want Sinister to die." He paused, then went on. "In pain, over a period of minutes. But yes, I want this over with."

The Black Panther blinked, then cocked his head in wordless question as to what Sinister had done to garner such hatred. But Harry simply smiled back at him thinly, gesturing out into the city. "Now, can we go see Thunderbird?"

After a second spent staring at Harry to see if he would elaborate, T'challa finally gave it up and nodded, gesturing for Harry to follow him through the city. A bare twenty paces later he took to the rooftops by climbing up an apartment building and then leaping over to the next.

"Now who's showing off?" Harry shouted after him before floating to land on the rooms beside him, cocking an eyebrow almost aggressively at the other man. In response T'challa simply snorted, then rushed on, heading towards the south of the city.

They found Thunderbird and the rest of his team embroiled in a battle with seven Mutant Liberation Front members. Three of them were energy manipulators. One blasted out energy from her hands, the second from his mouth, and the third from his chest. The color from each was different, with the last being larger and stronger seeming, since it sliced through a car like a large bolt of plasma, and the first did no damage to the wall it was hitting as Havok and Thunderbird dodged them.

Closer to the Apache warrior Harry had chosen as this impromptu team's leader was a giant man that Harry recognized as the one who went by the code name Sumo, who Mystique and her team had tangled with before. He was busy throwing around Thunderbird while trying to dodge incoming fire from Coyote on a nearby roof, who was aiming unerringly for his eyes and face. Though those shots wouldn't kill the large, extremely durable mutant, it would certainly blind him, and then Thunderbird might be able to finish him off.

Nearby, another three were climbing a building. One looked as if he was a lizard of some kind with a human head, the other had frog's feet, and the third had claws on his hands and feet. They were trying to encircle Havok and Thunderbird from on high, but, as Harry was about to rush in, he saw Banshee stick his head out from an upper story window in their line of advance. A point blank sonic scream smashed two of the crawlers off of the building to fall down to the ground below. Only the man with claws was still in place, but his head was lolling, and Banshee was able to fly out and then back, grabbing at his insensate form from behind and then attempting to pull him away from the wall with scant progress.

A nearby building suddenly began to collapse, or so it seemed at first, with smoke billowing out of it, causing dirt and dust to cover the battlefield. But then Cortez was there, hidden in the smoke just long enough to get into point blank range with Sumo, blinding him with a blast of energy to the face. In response Thunderbird didn't close to finish him off, but instead ran past Sumo to grapple with two of the energy shooters before they could pull back from where they had been stationed, using a turned over car on the side of the road as cover.

He smashed their heads together with bone crushing force, and they fell unconscious to the ground before a kick sent the third flying. That put every member of the MLF but Sumo down. And as Harry watched he took a blast from Havok and then another from Cortez, absorbing both sort of like the Blob. It was evident that he had an even higher level of durability than his size and strength would suggest.

T'challa had watched all this with Harry as they closed, and he cocked an eyebrow at Harry and then bowed grandly towards him, waving a hand forward even as he continued to run towards the action. Harry nodded back and gestured with one hand, sending out a low powered Wingardium Leviosa which took the Sumo wrestler in the back, lifting him off the ground. "W, what?! What is…"

Thunderbird didn't look a gift horse in the mouth, instead he grabbed at Sumo's legs where they floated in front of him and began to twirl him around, his current weightless nature allowing for this easily, whereas before Thunderbird would never have been able to lift him. He twirled him around four times before he hurled him up towards Banshee. "Banshee, pass!"

Turning from where he had been utterly unable to remove the claws of the third wall crawler from the wall he was stuck on, Banshee saw Sumo flying into the air up towards him, his curses filling the air around him. The Irishman grinned and then breathed in deeply while matching his speed to Sumo as he started to hover in the air, the spell Harry had hit him with slowly overcoming the momentum Thunderbird had given him. Then he hit the super-strong mutant with a point blank blast of sonic energy designed to scramble and knock him out regardless of his physical durability. The eardrums and mind of an individual were often not as durable as the rest, and Sumo screamed before he fell into a deep unconsciousness, still floating there in midair.

With another spell Harry arrested the Asian mutant's momentum gesturing him down towards the ground. By this point he and T'challa had reached Thunderbird and the others, who all came forward, with Thunderbird saluting Harry before holding out his hand. "Good to see you, boss. And thanks for the assist there. That bastard is really tough to deal with."

Harry shook his hand and then nodded to the others. "Good work, all of you. Decent teamwork and a good overall scheme. Although, how did those energy users get the drop on you initially?"

"They were hiding in a meat delivery truck at the back of a grocery store; attacked us when we passed by," Thunderbird grumbled in irritation before Havok, who had opened his mouth, could say anything. "I suppose we should have been ready for them, but we fought this group late last night, and we thought they had simply retreated to meet up with other groups. But that seems to be against the modus operandi of the Mutant Liberation Front for some reason. We let them think Anna and Banshee had been downed in their initial ambush and retreated a block before springing our own ambush on them."

Harry nodded and looked at the group. Besides Thunderbird, who looked a little dirt smudged and bruised, especially in the face, where he seemingly had taken a lot of punishment from Sumo or some other super-strong individual, the group looked battered and exhausted. Even in his armor Coyote slumped, while Cortez was missing half of her hair, the rest of her face showing signs of being healed by burn paste, and Havok's eyes were bloodshot. Banshee looked fine at first glance, but it was clear to someone looking closely that he was exhausted, and one of his legs wasn't bending as well as it should.

They hadn't been together as a team for very long, but all of them had been fighting in this war nearly from the beginning on other fronts, and this latest operation was pushing them just as hard as fighting the Russians, maybe more.

Still, that is what pepper-up potions are for. And I can get them a proper meal too. "Corey," he asked the thin air.

An instant later T'challa leaped away, cat-like metal claws popping out from his black gloves as he stared at the little creature that had just popped into existence directly in front of him.

"Yes, master, what can Cory do for you?" Corey asked while looking around excitedly. While not as interesting as popping into space on one of the asteroids there, at least this place was new. And he loved popping to new places.

"I think we need a few pepper-up potions and two picnic baskets worth of food, along with two bottles of wine and one of… Does anyone else have any preference?" When Banshee replied he'd prefer a small whiskey and a large lager while Cortez wanted a hard lemonade, of all things, Harry added them into his order and, several minutes later, sat down on a large blanket laid out on the roof of the tallest nearby building.

Nearby another blanket was set out, and Cory, after laying out the food magically, was now pouring a grateful Banshee his drink, while Cortez, Coyote and Coyote sat with him, shaking their heads in slight amusement. Of course, all of them had seen Harry's magic at work before and, indeed, the house elves too. But the idea of simply conjuring up several baskets of food in order to sit and have a picnic on top of a roof in the middle of a city that was a war zone was unusual, to say the least.

"So, talk to me," Harry said, turning back to Thunderbird as the other man sat down across from him.

Thunderbird grabbed a chicken leg and chewed on it enthusiastically, glancing sideways at T'challa as he did. "One thing you have the Black Panther and his people beaten all hollow on is food."

"It is not my fault that you and the rest of your team are effete Americans who don't know what good food is," the man in question replied with an eye roll, ignoring with lordly disdain the shout of "'Ere Now!" from Banshee, who was most decidedly not American.

As he finished his chicken leg, however, Thunderbird became serious, staring at Harry. "What do you want to know?"

"How did your team do? Were there any problems? What do you think of the Mutant Liberation Front? What do you think of this Mr. Sinister in person? I understand he was part of the ambush on T'challa," Harry reeled off quickly, looking at the other man expectantly.

The Apache warrior had grabbed another chicken leg as Harry was speaking and now chewed on it thoughtfully before replying. "In terms of my team, I think we did pretty well. We mesh decently. Banshee is one hell of a team player, always looking out for his comrades, sharp and on the ball. Coyote is much the same way. Cortez is getting there, and her long-range energy blasts were a major help, though she needs more target practice. She also has a…" He frowned thinking about how to put it. "A city sense, I suppose? That I lack. She was able to spot several places where an ambush could occur and even spot two ambushes before they did occur long before I could."

Harry nodded at that, then decided to bite the bullet. "And what about Havok?"

"He was the team's problem child, if only in a very specific way," Thunderbird said with a slow nod, glancing over towards where Havok was sitting, trying to not look as if he was attempting to listen in and failing both at listening in and looking as if he wasn't trying to. "He's got a bit of an ego and a major chip on his shoulder. He's arrogant and thinks he should be the leader, but…"

The younger man saw Harry simply staring at him blankly, and John Proudstar rolled his eyes. "Yes, I know there's a lot of the pot calling the kettle black, but there's a difference too. I came to the X-Men a blooded warrior; he didn't. And even if I was arrogant, you and Cyclops bashed that out of me quickly enough."

"Technically that's not true," Harry said slowly. "Havok had a lot of combat experience when he was one of the Hellions, or whatever they were called, under Sebastian Shaw. And he was team leader too."

"That's probably where it comes from, then," Thunderbird said with a nod. "He thinks he should be team leader and tried to override my orders several times and go his own way as often as he possibly could. That got us all in trouble at first until Cortez and Banshee both had a long chat with him. Still, his resentment is there. He's got a major chip on his shoulder, and this whole issue with Polaris isn't helping him."

"As far as I can tell, Polaris has dumped him or broken up with him anyway. Wait, what is the line between breaking up and dumping someone?" he asked, looking at the two other men, who both shrugged ignorance, and he went on with a sigh. "Anyway, she's done with him. If anything, I think she and Betsy are currently competing over their mutual interest in Steve."

"Steve? You mean Steve Rogers?" Thunderbird asked, shaking his head. "Guardian spirits, but you talking about Captain America like he's an old friend or, heck, his being around again still throws me!"

"Well, I wouldn't call him an old friend, unless I was talking about his age, of course," Harry said with a chuckle. "But yes, he's a friend." And might well become the day to day team lead for the Custodes if I can convince him after all this is over. "But from Polaris's perspective they've broken up, and she's moving on. I'm uncertain whether or not she's made that last point clear, but I know she's made the first one clear to to Havok several times. On the other hand, I also know that Charles said that his fixation on her was part of the indoctrination he went through as one of the Hellions. So perhaps it's something we should look into more closely…though I thought Charles already had."

Thunderbird got an odd look on his face and then shook his head slowly. "Um, Professor X just told me that he had, actually, and that any lingering connection between them was purely in Havok's head. He used their bond as an anchor to offset the amount of changes he's had to go through since his indoctrination was broken in the first place, and it hasn't been easy for him."

"That makes sense. We'll have to do something about that, but not right now," Harry said with a slow nod. "But now on to the more important questions."

"The Mutant Liberation Front seems to be made up of an odd mix of hardened killers and terrorists, obviously, on one hand. But on the other hand there are idealistic kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Kids who have been dealt a really nasty hand in life thanks to their mutant power and who are in it because they really think this cause is worth fighting for."

"Even after we have shown that humans and mutants can coexist, even after all of the good we've done?" Harry asked, frowning.

"Pretty much," Thunderbird said with a nod. "Although I'd lay odds that Mr. Sinister has somehow been able to cut them off from any kind of news network or information about the outside world right up until he released them on Genosha. But I don't think he really understood what impact so much combat and violence would have on them."

Thunderbird gestured down towards where the prisoners were still unconscious on the ground below. All of them were trussed up in chains, with Sumo still floating above a conjured cage surrounding them.

"That lot, two of them are the hard-core kind of sort, though I'm not certain if Sumo started that way. But while I can't tell about some of them, the one with frog powers and the one with the claws, if you look into their faces—when they're not trying to kill you, anyway—well, they look shell-shocked, like they're just going through the motions. We've all seen more than a few of them simply hesitate or just not give their all in any given fight."

Shaking his head, the Apache went on. "On the other hand there are the Marauders, the lieutenants that Sinister uses. Each and every one of that lot are cold, hard killers with murder raps in America and elsewhere from well before this. But we've done a decent job of taking them out in turn since we arrived. Although it's strange: I could've sworn that I saw someone like one of the people we had fought in the Vault during that last skirmish with Mr. Sinister."

"Numbers? How many mutants are we talking about spread across the MLF?" Harry asked. Mystique and Morph had never gotten that kind of information from the inside thanks to the MLF's cell organization, so he needed to know.

"If you're talking about hard-core true believers, twenty to thirty. It would've been two more before this last fight," Thunderbird said with a chuckle and another gesture down towards the prisoners. "If you're talking about the kids who are were just fed a load of shit and bought it…" Thunderbird shrugged. "Thirty or forty? Maybe as many as fifty. I haven't been able to get away from the city, but I know that most of them are camped right outside its outskirts, with only smaller groups still operating out elsewhere in the hinterlands, and most of those groups we've heard about don't look to be going around attacking the other locals.."

"I'm not certain you can use the word hinterlands to describe anything on an island this small," said the Black Panther ruefully. "Still, his numbers are accurate for all that."

Harry nodded, looking a little happier now. "Good. If they've just been led astray or indoctrinated, we don't have to kill them all. There's been enough killing today."

With that Harry pushed himself to his feet and flew up into the sky without another word, leaving the other two men to blink after him until they saw him fly through the shield dome he had created, which quickly closed behind him. There Harry used a spell on his voice, and when he spoke, his voice rang like thunder, so loud it actually hurt the eardrums of many of the people in the city below him.

"To the Mutant Liberation Front and its master, Mr. Sinister, my name is Guardian, or Harry Potter as I am known now worldwide. I am here on Genosha now to deal with you. You have no hope of victory or escape any longer, but I will give you one hour to surrender. After that I will attack, and no quarter will be asked or given. To those liberation front members who can hear my voice, I urge you to find an Internet connection, or even a library of some kind which has magazines about current events. You have been lied to!"

He roared the last words so loudly now that everyone in the city below had to cover their ears. He went on in a more normal volume, but his voice was still noticeably grim as he spoke, his words falling like anvils in a silence that seemed to encompass the entire small island of Genosha. "Your side is not fighting for mutant rights. You are fighting, if you're fighting for anything more than Mr. Sinister's own position and goals, for mutant supremacy. There have been other groups throughout history that believed their genetics made them superior, that they made them better, and anything they did to those who did not share their genes was not something to be mourned. I am giving most of you the benefit of the doubt in thinking you do not believe that any longer.

"If you do not wish to surrender while your leader is still around, then simply stand aside. This is between Mr. Sinister and me. No one else needs to die today," Harry repeated his earlier words before turning back and heading back down into and through the shield around the town. A minute later he was sitting back across John and T'challa while they and the others removed their hands from their ears.

"Do you think they'll listen?" he asked after they recovered.

Thunderbird spent a few seconds glaring at Harry for the pain he'd caused them all with that little stunt, but after his ire dissipated, he shook his head. "For the most part, no. Though if any of them are currently camped out near a library, perhaps they'll take the few minutes to check up on your story. But if you're expecting a wider rebellion, you'd best think again."

"No, that wasn't what I intended. I wanted to get them to start thinking for themselves and possibly to step aside. If I have to fight anyone to get to Sinister, I'd rather it was serial killers or unrepentant mutant supremacists who turned to terrorism willingly. If I can get a few kids who have realized this is a lot more serious than shouting slogans or learning to defend themselves to step aside, it's time well used. But what did you think of Sinister himself?" Harry asked, knowing that his moment of humanity had certainly cost him any element of surprise he might have otherwise had and not wanting to talk about it further. "I understand he was actually involved in the ambush on T'challa."

T'challa scowled, wiping his fingers on the picnic blanket underneath them as he glared up at the sky. It hurt to know that, without Thunderbird and his team's arrival, he would have been killed, and worse, that he hadn't even done much to slow Mr. Sinister or his best troopers down. He liked to think that that wouldn't have been the case one-on-one, and certainly it was with most of them. But Mr. Sinister, something about that man told T'challa that even one-on-one he wouldn't have much of a chance.

Thunderbird thought for a moment, then said slowly, "It was an ambush from start to finish. He likes to use bait, I think. He used T'challa's troops as bait for him, and then when T'challa was there, ambushed him. There is always going to be more, too. He's always going to bring something a little different. He's a planner, not a natural tactician. He also didn't react well when my team and I showed up. Not angrily, but he was unable to deal with the sudden surprise of our arrival. But even with that, if we're going to be fighting him on his own ground, that will make him very dangerous."

Harry thought for a moment, then smiled grimly. "In that case, would you say that he would know about my weaknesses and about how to defend against magic, perhaps?"

'Yes," John said bluntly. "Very much so."

"Well, that's fine," Harry said with a nod. "I can plan for that, and if he's gone for my most glaring weakness, there is a way to counter that too." Thunderbird looked at Harry quizzically, while T'challa simply sat there, understanding that he was missing half of this conversation. Harry, however, just smiled. "Never think that the gifts of the gods are as simple or utilitarian as they appear."

After he was done speaking to Thunderbird and T'challa, Harry left them with one of the bottles of wine and the rest of the alcohol he had had Cory drop off and carried the other one with him towards the the area of the city where T'challa had indicated Emma and Charles had been set up. As he did, Emma finally got it into contact with him mentally, her diamond-like astral projection appearing in his mind via the conduit Jean had created, which only the two of them could access.

"Well, it's about time," she said waspishly, her dark blue eyes flashing with anger, an expression that in the astral plane was not at all hyperbole. "Is there any reason why you decided to meet with Proudstar before you met with us?"

"I had understood that you and Charles had things under control and wanted to touch base with our least-experienced team leader," Harry replied soothingly, his own much more plebian astral form moving over to Emma's, putting his arms around her shoulders, and pulling her into a hug that, while a pale imitation of the physical variety, at least would convey his feelings to Emma. "Are you all right?"

"No, I'm fucking well not!" Emma barked back before she seemed to calm down. "Well, the enemy telepath did finally run out of willpower a few hours before you arrived. Charles and I are indeed now free on that front, and I can, for the first time since my arrival here, notice my own physical body again." Her astral projection paused in her speech, frowning as she looked away from Harry, out past the outer ramparts of his defenses, and then shook her head. "God damn, I need a drink and I need a bath too! Ugh, this heat and humidity is soo not good for the skin."

Harry chuckled, pulling Emma's astral projection into a tighter hug, knowing that despite being cast in diamond, Emma would feel it. "Well, I can deal with the first. In fact, I'm carrying a bottle of wine already. And I can conjure up the second. Although, if you are asking me to help you in the bath, I'm afraid my little deadline to Sinister and his coterie of pawns does not let me enough time to properly…wash…you."

Emma's diamond form projection tinted pink at that, a sign of both pleasure and lust mixed rather than a blush. "That's good. And if you come bearing wine, I suppose I'm done trying to rip your head off. But this has not been a fun time for me," she said in a tone of manifest understatement.

"I'm already within sight of your tent's guards, and I will have Cory pop back to High Note to get you some more food too," Harry sent back soothingly, looking around physically as he came to the area T'challa had described to him. The tent was set in an open-air market, which looked oddly peaceful and undamaged despite the violence which had raged and was still raging throughout the city, with hundreds of refuge tents set up around it. The tent itself had heavy protection around it in the form of twenty guards. Half of them were American marines, the other half Wakandans, with heavy guns hidden behind sandbags at eight positions surrounding the tent. Harry was waved through without comment, with the commander murmuring that T'challa had called ahead, not even noticing the looks of awe and shock a lot of the locals were shooting his way.

"Just so long as the wine is properly chilled, I don't care about the food at this point," Emma retorted, but there was no more heat in her voice.

As her words had warned him might be the case, when Harry pushed his way into the telepaths' tent, he found Emma looking incredibly haggard. It was an air-conditioned tent, and she and Charles were reclining in extremely comfortable looking chairs. But it was obvious that both of them had not moved from those chairs in far too long, and both of them were covered with sweat despite the air conditioning. Emma's hair was also matted to her head, and her skin, normally pale but vibrant, now looked almost sickly.

But despite her haggardness, Emma still pushed herself out of her chair, her eyes bright, as she moved towards Harry. She then grabbed him by the front of his crysis suit and pulled him into a fierce liplock. And yet, as they were kissing, Harry could feel her body trembling against his, and not with passion. No, Emma could barely stand on her feet. Her body was utterly exhausted in a way that she had not been when he had met with her after leaving the coven spell fighting against the Dire Wraiths' cold spell.

Before he could get the words out, though, Emma anticipated his question and sent, "I am fucking exhausted!" before pulling back and saying aloud, "I didn't push myself as hard as Phoenix did earlier, but fighting Sinister's telepath seems to have nearly made up for it."

"Indeed, wherever this Sinister fellow got this telepath of his, he or she is most puissant," Charles agreed. He didn't look nearly as exhausted as Emma, and Harry idly wondered if that was because he had been fresher when called in or something else. Charles's next words put that into perspective quickly. "I cannot quite get get a sense of the mind behind this, but he or she is incredibly good on the attack, as our inestimable Diamond prefers to be. Myself, I excel at defense, even defending other non-telepathic minds from telepathic assault."

"What he's not saying is that Professor X is also far more skilled in pure telepathic combat than I am," Emma said sardonically. "I've only rarely met other telepaths that are on my level, whereas this elderly fellow apparently met and defeated another telepath in single combat years ago. What was his name?"

"Less of the elderly, if you please," Charles replied primly. "But yes. He called himself the Shadow King, and he was attempting to take over the criminal side of Cairo. Ironically, dealing with him let Storm escape my attention for long enough that she was able to get out of the city entirely without my knowing. We fought for hours in the real world and far longer on the astral plane. But in comparison to him, this new telepath has tremendous power but little experience in wielding it. Indeed, if we could but find his or her mind, I'm almost certain that we could defeat them. But as powerful as this individual is, they are also extremely good at hiding."

In contrast to Charles, Emma had never had to fight an opponent on the mental plane that came near to her own level. While the fight for Hela's mind against Those Who Watch Above in Shadow had been a hell of a baptism, it was also extremely different. In that fight she'd one mind to defend and, okay, partially reclaim, but she had also had Hela in her corner, able to help her along. And, for all their power, the Shadows had not been at home in the astral plane, able to fight there as well as a telepath could. It had also essentially been an offensive duel, the Shadows attempting to attack Hela while she concentrated on attacking in turn.

Here Emma had thousands of other minds to defend, and not a one of them had the ability to help her do it. All most of the Marines or African troopers could tell was one moment they were suddenly under attack by gremlins and Devils taken from every mythology on Earth, and the next those creatures disappeared. If not for T'challa making sure everyone knew it was a kind of psychic assault, he would have had most of his people questioning their sanity.

"What is the fight like on the astral plane?" Harry asked before asking Cory to reappear. Cory did so and started to hand out small plates of food.

"Consider the defense as a wall of diamond," Emma began, pausing as she took in Harry's sudden smirk and thwacking him on the thigh lightly before going on. "We can construct walls around the minds of the individuals in the city, but we cannot maintain them for very long. So we leave it in place as a sort of early warning system. Once the attacks began, we then rush our reinforcements, as it were, to the minds under attack. It gave the enemy the advantage of initiative, but thankfully they seem to have been forced to retire."

"And I have to reiterate," Charles said, swallowing his own food, which he had instantly begun eating with far less decorum than Emma was now doing. Such things were ingrained in her, after all, despite her exhaustion. "That those attacks were powerful, far stronger than even my own would have been against so many minds at once."

"And you can't find this telepath's mind?"

"No. Whoever it is has some kind of mechanical device that obscures their mind. We can sense their actions on the astral plane, but we can't quite grab onto their thoughts. Even so, there must be a cost." Harry looked at him, and he shrugged. "Psychic powers are the closest mutants can come to wielding magic, in a way, and, like magicians, we always have a limit to what we can do, not in terms of 'spellwork,' but in the overall power we can output at any given time. I think they're resting right now, but I also think they pushed well beyond what I would have termed human endurance. I think the telepath has shot their bolt," he said definitively, "and your attack on Sinister can go through without further distractions from that quarter."

"Good to know," Harry said with a nod.

"So, what are your plans?" Emma asked, looking at Harry. "We heard your earlier announcement, but beyond that…"

"Well, I'm going to kill Sinister, obviously," Harry replied sardonically before shaking his head. "Beyond that, I get to step back and play peacemaker."

"Why?" Charles asked, blinking. "I mean, I understand what you said here to Mutant Liberation Front, and I fully endorse attempting to aid those poor, deluded young people. But surely the Russians made their own bed, and you can expect the rest of the nations of the world to handle peace talks."

"I would've said so, but we now have definitive proof that many of the Russians were actually replace by alien shapeshifters," Harry said, reminding himself that Charles had been somewhat out of that loop, and Emma obviously had not brought him up to speed when she called him in for help here. "We don't want to invade Russia. If we can make the Russians aware of the alien threats that are out there after helping them deal with the Dire Wraiths, that will bring in the last major block on Earth, and we'll need it. Specifically, we'll need that warren of tunnels the Subterraneans dug out for them throughout Russia. Oh, I have no doubt that Russia is going to deal with a lot of internal division, segments along the borders wanting to break off from the Russian Federation, and I know that's Azerbaijan and Georgia will demand reparations in terms of lands, and the Chinese will want that island in the Alar River back. But beyond that, I mean to make certain that the reparations they are forced to pay are not nearly as onerous as those placed on Germany after World War I. We do not want to repeat this, after all, and those tunnels… Well, they could be very important. As could the industrial capacity hidden within those tunnels."

Emma blinked at that, her eyes widening as she put the dots together, and nodded in fervent agreement before she turned away, looking out towards the ocean. "We have Cyclops and the rest incoming, Harry."

"Good." Harry allowed a thin smile to cross his face. "We've got less than half an hour before my deadline is up, and I mean to have us all ready to go when it becomes time to bring the hammer down."

OOOOOOO

Unlike most of the Mutant Liberation Front, Sinister had the means to watch events worldwide as well as the interest in doing so, something he had carefully pruned away from most of the MLF. He had known almost instantly when the war had turned against Russia earlier that day. He didn't know if they could recover, but he didn't think it likely, nor did he care. What mattered to Sinister was that the cold front had snapped, which he was quite happy about. After all, who would want to live on a world going through a second ice age?

But he also knew that, with the Russians dealt with, Potter would come for him. So he began to plan his end game. First he had his current masterpiece, the experiment who he had decided could call herself Madelyne Pryor, slowly let her telepathic assaults peter out. She had been using Sinister's version of Cerebro to create those attacks. It was similar to Xavier's version, but where that device aided a telepath in finding people he was searching for, adding to the range of their radar, as it were, Sinister's Cerebro multiplied the user's telepathic attack power. And since Madelyne was nearly as powerful as subject Grey was, that made her formidable indeed, despite her lack of experience.

Yes, Sinister thought to himself, I did quite a good job with that one. She believes me her lover and is utterly devoted to me. Such things are useful. And since she was so loyal, the clone of subject Grey was the only one of his followers he was going to have with himself in his actual lab. There was simply too much danger of damage being done to the lab, and his primary lab being opened to the battlefield. Even hard-bitten killers like the Marauders would not be pleased to know that he had decanted all of their clones at once, stationing them in groups throughout Genosha's governmental tower.

Amusingly, I was able to tell each team the same story: that the other floors were flooded with gas or other such traps, and they could not survive there. That and the fact that I have long since modified their genes such that they never question orders, of course.

But those troops were little more than roadblocks, things intended to peel off Potter's troops in turn, along with a few other factors. It was in his lab where the true trap Sinister had devised for Potter was waiting. Everything else was leading up to that one final trap, the weakness that he had discovered. Ironically, if I had gotten Morgan to help me, she would not be able to be there with me at the finish because of that trap. Or perhaps I would have had her there and simply killed her once Potter was captured. She could well become a threat eventually. Still, she did not join me, and there is no use in thinking about what ifs.

Now he stood in the top floor of the tower, staring out into the capital city. It still had power, of course, and, at least according to the Press Gang, the government still ruled the city, keeping order within its environs under the orders of Sinister in his High Genegineer guise. Of course, the Press Gang had mostly left the city by this point, pushed down into the port to combat the Wakandan prince and his forces. Where they had been just neatly mousetrapped a moment before. That glowing dome in the distance must be Potter's magical shield around the city my spotters told me of. Fascinating. He is quite powerful. I have to wonder if perhaps a merging of his DNA with subject Grey's, like their children, would be even better for my plans than the original between subject Summers and subject Grey might prove. It will be fascinating to compare the two, at any rate.

Just as that thought flashed across his mind, Potter's voice rang out over the island, and Mr. Sinister cocked his head, listening intently. Hmm… Pure propaganda, of course, but an adroit move all the same, since even if it is propaganda, it is the best kind: that based in face. If I had been counting on my Mutant Liberation Front for anything but fodder on other fronts, it might well have discommoded my plans. As it is, though, none in this tower will respond to that kind of blatant lie. Come then, Harry Potter. Beard this dragon in his lair, if you dare, and you will run into far more than you can handle.

OOOOOOO

Sputnik had been pulled back from the front lines because of the injury Dr. Doom had given him, which, even which his cybernetic parts, he had barely survived. Normally even that would not have kept a Super Trooper from the front lines, but Sputnik was easily the best electronics warfare expert that the Russians had, thanks to his power to control anything mechanical. They couldn't afford to lose him, so he was now stuck inside a bunker well away from the front lines.

As Harry was preparing for his assault on Sinister, Sputnik was dealing with what he saw as a major security threat to Russia. Someone had gotten access to Russia's internal web—interweb—and had created thousands of programming bots to posit that Dr. Volkh, who Sputnik had met and somewhat admired, had willingly joined forces with aliens in an effort to rule over the frozen wasteland of the world. Now, while Sputnik himself had some severe reservations about the use of King Winter and had long wondered why, if it was supposedly a scientific weapon he couldn't figure out how it worked, he wasn't about to let this assault continue.

He knew that this must be some kind of cyberwarfare act, and, as such, he was trying to follow the bots back to the original break into the interweb. But even with his power, Sputnik found he couldn't find that initial point of access easily. After several false starts, he ran into actual living opposition in the form of a hacker named Sage145 and knew that he had met the face of the enemy. "I will not allow this assault to continue," he said in cyber-speak, his thoughts flashing with all the speed of a computer as he ripped apart the code of the interweb around them, trying to disconnect Sage145 from the Russian Internet. "You will not destabilize my country with this blatant lie!"

"But what if it's the truth?" Sage replied, her own thoughts matching his for speed, if not for sheer ability in coding. She was losing slowly, but Sputnik could tell that this was only one aspect of her assault on his country, somehow. And indeed, this was the case.

Sage had quickly figured out a way to connect via telephone lines into the Institute for Parallel Thought and was currently helping that Institute get the word out. The two guards had convinced their surviving superiors as to what had been really been going on, and all the aliens within had been killed during or directly after the Custodes assault. She was also helping the Institute defensively by making it look as if those reports were coming from several dozen other bases rather than it. That last point wouldn't last for long, but it would last for long enough to get the word out and for it to become self-sustaining. Once that was done, the dark web and the Internet would do the rest. With that physical connection to the interweb established, Sage was also opening up more avenues of attack: covering up for several antigovernment meetings, diverting police responses to antigovernment rallies, and, generally speaking, making things hot for the Russian government and the aliens within it.

Now, even as Sputnik tried to find her original point of access, Sage sent him a soundbite of the recorded interrogation of Dr. Volkh. It was a calculated risk, but one that she hoped would garner Sputnik's support.

After a moment Sputnik replied, "This is all hearsay, and a confession such as this could be coerced." But he had stopped in his attempts to push her out, waiting for her rebuttal.

"It could," she agreed. "However, I have schematics for a device from Mr. Fantastic that would be able to discern whether or not someone is an alien." Sputnik scoffed—an interesting feat in computer code—and was about to reply as to the myriad number of ways that could be faked, but Sage went on calmly. "I also have a list of three of the generals who Dr. Volkh knew to be aliens. Would following up on that bit of the interrogation matter? The device itself is not painful or intrusive. It simply shows if someone has a high glucose content in their body and the slight differences in body heat and where that body heat is situated in comparison to a human. Surely simply checking will cost you nothing. Or do you have some other idea of where the Planetary Soul Constrictor came from?"

"…Perhaps," Sputnik said. He almost glared at her virtual avatar, then asked abruptly, "And if I agree to allow you to propagate that design through the system, will you cease your attempts to undermine our military forces?"

"I will cease my attempt to undermine your military within your own territories, but any Army group that is outside of Russia's borders is fair game," she said firmly.

Since there was scant little that Sputnik could do here in the deep of Russia for those armies, he had to concede the point. "Very well, I will look at this device."

The data passed between them as fast as a blink, and Sputnik analyzed it almost as quickly, a frown appearing on his physical body. It did indeed look as if this device could only do the things that Sage had said: it could point out places where the body it was currently scanning was hotter than it should be, where it was cooler than it should be, and also some strange readings from heart and stomach that could indicate a higher level of glucose intake than was normal in a human being.

"We shall see," he said abruptly. "Until then, get out of my web."

Sage nodded, and Sage145 and several thousand of her other personas all disappeared from the interweb.

With the foreigner dealt with, Sputnik leaned back in his chair, disconnecting from the system for a moment to knead his forehead in a human gesture he had never quite gotten rid of. Well, the aliens theory would answer quite a lot of questions. But we shall see. I am not so ready to believe the word of an enemy, after all. But if we have been been betrayed and used, then who is the primary enemy?

Sputnik could form no reply to his own question, and, with a sigh, he pushed himself away from the massive supercomputer in front of him, moving out of the door and into the next laboratory over, where he quickly began to use his powers to put together the device the woman had told him had been devised by Mr. Fantastic. Once it was built, to his regret, it still seemed on the level, and Sputnik scowled. Well, it is a real device, anyway. Now, how to test it?

OOOOOOO

The instant the hour ended, Harry and the gathered Custodes were on the move. Opening a hole in the series of shields around the port, Harry flew a large magic carpet up into the air over the city, then flew towards the capital of Genosha, which had been renamed Purity, according to the locals in the port, some years ago. It was a normal seeming city for the most part, with the regular amount of skyscrapers, office buildings, apartments, etc., but at one edge of it, rising over the smaller skyscrapers, was the government's building, which had, since this civil war began, been renamed the High Genegineer's Tower.

This building had been designed to look almost like a wave crashing against a wall. With its flat back toward the hills the locals thought were mountains, the front facing in toward the heart of the city was a shaped in a concave manner. The foot of the building and 'wave' was about a block long and four stories tall, rising in a smooth curve into the main portion of the building. This portion was thinner than the lower floors but far taller, making about seventy more floors. The information on the tower they had found varied between seventy and seventy-five floors for some reason. The top of the wave then curved back out for half a block. It was supposed to house the president's office, a meeting hall, and a restaurant. The whole thing had been painted in shade of blue and white.

But that had been before the outbreak of violence which had riven this nation in two. Now the building sported numerous areas that looked like blast damage, and there wasn't a single window intact at the foot of the wave. The top of it was covered by six anti-air cannons, and over a dozen random offices had been repurposed to house small mortars and other types of artillery. The buildings and the large parking lot on either side of the building were also dotted by further makeshift security.

The only guns that really mattered, however, were the antiair guns, which began to fire upon the flying carpets as they closed with the gigantic building. But, as they did, Thunderbird, Cyclops, Havok, and Colossus returned fire with their own weapons. The two super-strong mutants were using two heavy graviton cannons, much like the ones the Ravens housed, and they tore through the buildings around the main governmental complex. While Havok and Cyclops destroyed the guns on the complex's roof, Harry, Dr. Druid, and Kitty concentrated on evading the incoming fire.

"Sunfire, Rogue, Banshee, go," Harry ordered calmly as he and Kitty flew the carpets around the governmental building.

"You're becoming far too comfortable ordering me about, gaijin. This is something we will have to address later," Sunfire muttered even as he jumped off of the back of Harry's carpet and began to fall towards the ground, his powers activating a few seconds later. He and the other two flyers flew around the building, lashing out at each installation as they went.

This seemed to signal the defenders to step up their game, because from several different places around the building façade, energy blasts and other kinds of attacks began to fire on the three flyers. One of them was as simple as someone throwing a large girder out of the window in an attempt to nail Rogue, but she simply flew around it. The others were much more dangerous energy blasts of various types. Harpoons laced with some kind of green energy and thermal based energy blasts like plasma beams only wider, moving faster through the air, for some reason, than the plasma blasts of the rifles that Harry's company had designed, came from various places. Others were simply lasers, sunlight condensed into a beam of energy that cut through the air faster and even deadlier than the plasma because of that speed.

Banshee couldn't dodge one of those last beams enough and nearly lost his arm to one such strike. His wild evasion let him live, but his arm was still caught in the searing beam of energy. He was then caught in the leg by a flak explosion which spun him end over end, out of control until Rogue caught him and stabilized his flight. "Faith forfend, that was a close one, but I'm all right now, lassie," the ex-Interpol agent shouted, pushing her away with his one working arm, his other arm hanging useless at his side, the visible skin of his lower arm seared to black from the heat of the beam's passage. It was intensely painful, but he was still in the fight.

At the same time Kitty's magic carpet, which had just started to go lower towards the top of the building, started to slow down for some reason, and her eyes widened. "What…the…heck…" she said slowly, while several of the the defenders began to line her up with energy blasts, causing her to panic even as everything around her was slowed down like she had suddenly been stuck in molasses.

Among the defenders who had rushed out onto the roof after Harry's team had destroyed the antiair cannons, one man was thrusting out his hand towards where Kitty was directing her magic carpet as the others began to train their weapons on them. She didn't know how he was doing it, but he had somehow slowed them down.

Then Harry lashed out with a single cutting spell which caught the man before he could dodge away, slicing him in two.

The next blast that hit the roof came from Cyclops, who was sitting on Dr. Druid's magic carpet along with the rest of the X-Men. This cleared the defenders out for a brief moment, and Harry directed his magic carpet down towards the top of the building. "Assault team, go!"

Thunderbird, Colossus, and Warpath all leaped off of his carpet, as there was about twenty feet still below them, with Psylocke, Magma, and Nightcrawler following on their heels from Dr. Druid's flying carpet as Harry pulled his own carpet up and out of the way. "Let's rumble!" Nightcrawler shouted as he fell toward the roof behind the others.

Psylocke shook her head. "What the bloody heck was that supposed to be?"

"Our war cry, of course," Nightcrawler said with a huff.

"We do need to work on a team war cry," Warpath said, nodding his head sagely even as he fell through the sky towards the building below them.

"'No one gets out alive?'" Spyke asked.

"What are we, evil robots?" Cyclops joked, causing the others to gawk at him before, below them, Thunderbird slammed down onto the roof, the first of them to do so.

One of the defenders twisted around, aiming his arms towards them. He was a crystal form mutant, one that Thunderbird recognized, and he smiled grimly as he thrust out a heavy shield of juggernaut-based armor that he had on one arm, taking the laser blast that the man sent his way and plowing through it. Above him he heard the distinct 'bamf' of Nightcrawler teleporting as he crossed the last few feet down to the top of the building his own way, depositing Psylocke and himself in among some of the Press Gang that were there, lashing out at them.

Before the energy and crystal form individual could back away, Warpath was behind him, one of his hatchets twirling. And, just like in the battle in the Vault, while his crystal form gave Prism the ability to ignore energy blasts of any kind, it proved less than useless against a simple physical assault. He shattered with a scream of agony, pieces of his body flying everywhere, almost like shrapnel.

"You'll pay for that!" With that shout Blockbuster slammed into Warpath's side, taking him to the ground, his fists rising and falling like jackhammers as he pummeled the other super-strong mutant. But Warpath could take that pummeling and did, getting his hands up to protect himself.

Then his brother was beside him, grabbing Blockbuster's arm and holding it in place with one of his own as he slammed a hard fist into the bald man's face. Blockbuster staggered but wrenched out of Thunderbird's grip and returned with his own punch as more of the defenders came out onto the roof.

First came Harpoon, followed by Thermal and Arclight, then came Riptide, Scalphunter, and a man none of the Custodes or X-men had seen before. He was a lean, wiry-looking man wearing body armor underneath a long brown coat. His short brown hair was spiked up, with a bandanna around his forehead. He wielded a long metal staff in one hand and a series of playing cards in the other, the playing cards glowing with dark pink energy of some kind.

Harpoon launched harpoons filled with bio energy at the two Native American super-strong mutants. The first missed Warpath's face by inches, flashing across his face. The second slammed into Thunderbird's back before he could turn, sending him reeling forward into a blow from Blockbuster that nearly took his head off despite the best his brother could do to try to get in the other super-strong mutant's way.

At the same time Psylocke was nearly pin-cushioned midair by Riptide's stilettos as he spun in place, hurling them all around. The three fighting mutants in the center of the roof ignored them, their durability able to take them easily. At the same time, though, Nightcrawler hissed as one of them nearly took his ear off, while another embedded itself in his shoulder right below where his own chest plate began before he could bamf away. Spyke too took a stiletto which punched straight through his leg's bone armor, drawing blood but not slowing him down as he raced into the melee, slamming into Blockbuster's back like a runaway spiked mace.

The defenders' reply was a little too late to stop the heavy assault team from creating a beachhead for the others. While the three flyers continued to destroy defensive installations around the building, Harry teleported everyone else bar Kitty from the magic carpets down onto the opened area of the rooftop, then turned his attention to the defenders. "Arresto Momentum," Harry intoned, pointing at Riptide as he landed beside them, followed by the rest of the combined attack group.

Riptide instantly came to a halt, his face shocked, before Havok caught him with one of his blasts. It caught the man full bore in the face, blasting his head into offal.

Havok and Spyke were then forced to dodged back as Scalphunter created a large cannon of some kind in one hand from bits and pieces of the antiair cannons all around them. But Cyclops caught him with a blast from his eyes, sending the man hurling over the side of the building with a cry of agony.

This left the last man and Harpoon from the group that had just rushed out onto the rooftop, and the unknown man seemed to understand this. "Time to retreat, mon frere," he said, hurling his playing cards all around him. They glowed with purple energy: somewhat like Harpoon's, only with a great deal more glow to them than the Alaskan mutant's weapons. They also sped through the air very quickly, much faster than they should have.

Colossus took a blast from one of them to his head that, while it didn't hurt him, knocked him off of his feet. Another one impacted the ground right before Harry, causing him to step backwards as it exploded on impact, though it didn't actually harm him either, while the others all ducked or hid behind the nearest cover, which sometimes included their own more durable fellows. This let Harpoon get one more shot off, and he nailed Cyclops in the chest with one of his bioenergy-charged harpoons, but Cyclops was wearing his X-Men uniform which had armor in it and rolled away, blasted off his feet but otherwise unharmed.

Yet Harpoon had stayed just a little too long to get that shot off. Harry blew his head off with a well-placed Reducto.

Elsewhere on the roof, Thunderbird had gotten Blockbuster's arms behind him. This let his brother end the fight on the roof by caving in the man's chest with one of his hatchets, the other one having been mangled in the fight.

Arclight, though, had gotten Colossus onto his back thanks to the man that she had called Gambit's help and was slamming vibration assisted fists into his head again and again. The vibrations were doing what the punches alone could not do, getting through Colossus's metal to the point where his brain was being literally bounced around in its brain box, causing him to slowly lose consciousness.

But whatever durability Arclight might have against regular attacks did not equate to being any more defended from magical attacks than Harry had noticed in other super durable mutants. A cutting spell sliced into her body from the side, nearly cutting her in half. The dying woman collapsed to one side as Harry moved over to his friend, helping Colossus to his feet. "Are you all right?"

Colossus pointed at his head groggily, unwilling to shake it at the moment. "What was she hitting me with!? My head, it feels like I set it on a train track and let the train run over me a few times."

"Vibrations," Thunderbird said, nodding his head as he remembered his own run in with Arclight. "She releases these blasts of vibration when she hits you, and that makes her blows that much more devastating to your insides. Against a head, well, it's even worse."

"Right," Colossus said, slowly regaining his equilibrium. "I'm good," he said at last, nodding his head towards Harry.

Harry nodded back and gestured down into the building. "Warpath, with me. Thunderbird and Colossus will be behind us. Everyone else, hide behind us for a bit until we either run into the defenders or an open area. Havok, stay here and keep control of the roof for us."

Cyclops nodded, looking over at Riptide and Scalphunter in particular. "Those two should've been dead. I'm not so certain about the others, but I know they died."

Thunderbird nodded. "I know I've killed Riptide before this, and the Black Panther killed Scalphunter when my team and I had to rescue him. Whatever cloning technology Sinister has is frankly too incredible to believe."

"We've theorized that might be the case for a while, though the speed of the cloning might be worrisome unless he clones them in batches and lets them out one at a time," Harry said frowning.

"I'm just glad glad he can't clone all of them," Psylocke said, touching her chest gingerly, where an errant piece of shrapnel had caught her. "Imagine if he could clone all the MLF mutants too."

"True," Harry said with a nod. Once everyone was back on their feet, he nodded towards Warpath, who joined him as they descended into the building, while Harry continued to get out orders to the flyers. "Banshee, you're in charge out here. Keep your attack going until all of the defensive installations are dead, then follow us in from a random direction. Nightcrawler, get going."

Like what Neophyte had done during the attack on the research station in Russia, Nightcrawler's job was simply to cause chaos throughout the building, using his powers to hit and run, pulling defenders this way and that, taking Psylocke and Magma along. Being the lightest, he could teleport the two of them a decent distance, and the way his powers worked, he didn't have to know where he was going as intimately as Harry had to for his own teleportation powers. In fact, for short distances Kurt's teleportation worked better than even Ororo's, which Harry could also use, although not while he was fighting.

With Harry and Warpath in the lead, the rest of the team forged down into the building. But when they reached the next floor down, they instantly began to run into trouble.

Another Riptide was there, stepping out into the hallway and smiling at them. "Ah, my friends," he addressed them in a joking, almost jocular manner. "I'm afraid I can't let you pass." With that he began to spin, flinging out his daggers at super speeds.

But they all fell as Harry used the same spell he'd used before, stopping their momentum and Riptide's. From behind Harry came an energy blast that smashed into Riptide's face, turning it into so much mush. The others turned to look at Cyclops, and he shrugged. "I had the professor look up anything we could find on someone matching his description.

"Cloning," Warpath muttered, nodding his head grimly. "Right."

"Time to spread out, folks," Harry said. "Make sure they can't overwhelm us with sheer numbers. Thunderbird, take Spyke with you to the right. Psylocke, Warpath, with me right down the middle. We'll use the stairs. Cyclops, you and Husk to the left."

They fought their way down through six more floors, running into more clones, though thankfully none of the clones were working together. Riptide, Blockbuster, and Prism seemed to be the ones that were cloned the most often, and Harry idly wondered if, perhaps for some reason, their genetics were more stable or something.

Regardless, the cloned Marauders fought in teams of four to a floor and slowed Harry and his team down occasionally before they were encircled by the three teams and wiped out before the Custodes moved on. Slowing the attackers down was all they could do, even with Harry conserving his magical power, and all of them being careful not to run over any noncombatants.

The reason for this was simple: Harry wouldn't put it past Sinister to use living shields, normal governmental employees and such, to defend himself. And Harry wanted no atrocities here. If that wasn't the case, he thought to himself as they reached the tenth floor down from the roof, I'd simply have exploded the building entirely. Although, perhaps not. Even using the same spells I did against the Russian Air Force bases, I wouldn't put it past someone as sneaky as Sinister to be able to figure out a way to survive and get away. No, I want to see his body before me and then make damn sure that he hasn't been able to clone himself. That would be a nightmare.

Elsewhere, Nightcrawler had teleported from one floor to the other randomly, getting behind some of the defensive installations still shooting at the flyers outside as well as behind some of the interior defenders, but he was also running into issues. As the fight continued, he and the others started to run into more Blockbuster and Arclight clones, an issue made worse by the fact that a few of the defenders who had been trying to tag their flyers had pulled back into the building to help with the interior security. But whenever they ran into a defense that was too tough for them to plow through, Nightcrawler would simply teleport himself Magma, and Psylocke away.

The only one who didn't seem to have been cloned was Gambit, the man who had retreated from the rooftop. The telepath had also failed to make his or her presence known just yet. For whatever reason, Sinister was husbanding their power now when he had been so profligate with it before. Harry figured it was because he was waiting to unleash her on them at the right time, but through fifteen floors nothing of the sort occurred. With Harry's magic and their numbers against the scattered defenders, they were able to plow through most of the defenses, since, whatever else he could do, Sinister could not let the clones become aware of one another, which made each position too small and weak to stop the combined Custodes/X-men assault.

The only ones that continually made problems were Arclight and Blockbuster. Their durability was such that only Harry and the other super-strong members of the team could do much against them. But even there, the attackers definitely had an advantage.

This was ended abruptly when Harry and the main assault reached the fiftieth floor down from the rood, and Sinister's pet telepath made herself known at last. A blast of telepathic energy roared into the attackers throughout the building, halting most of them in place. The assault, much like the ones Emma and Charles had been fighting before this, took the form of night terrors accompanied by a wave of fear beating against their minds. But where before all the terrors had been imps and other demonic entities pulled from religious images, these were more personal.

Cyclops screamed, holding his head as he fell back, covering his eyes with his hands, not as if to shield his head, but to block them in, as if he was seeing some vision of his eyes going wild. Next to him, Spyke too halted, collapsing to the side as he saw the image of his bones all turning against him, completely burying him underneath bone and never receding. Magma was back with her father, being led to her intended marriage with his fellow senator, an obese man who was his own age, who leered at her as she was being led to his door. There was no world outside of New Rome, no Brazil, no X-Men, no powers.

Nightcrawler alone dealt with being attacked by demonic beasts straight out of the Bible, and it was no coincidence that a lot of them looked like his own body, the image torn from old nightmares about his origins and the fears of it to his staunchly Catholic mind. "Devil child!" a voice shouted in the background of that image. "Down with the devil!"

Only Harry and Psylocke were immune. Harry's mind, as always, was hidden underneath his invisibility cloak, while Psylocke bit off the assault on her mind with difficulty. But Colossus, Husk, Thunderbird, and Warpath halted as well, their bodies no longer responding to exterior stimuli as their minds were frozen in place by this assault, though in Colossus's case his nightmare was about other people dying, in particular his sister, something that set him aside from the others except for Cyclops.

Harry immediately tried to get in touch with Emma only to find both electronic and mental communications blocked somehow. Reaching inside, he even found the link to Jean severed, the permanent mental highway she had made between their minds no longer there. Oh, that's not good at all… I hope Hela's around when she wakes up, or else that could go very, very bad.

He even tried to use a magic mirror, since he knew Emma always had the one. He'd given her one so many months ago. But even that failed somehow, and he growled, looking around as he wondered how that was happening.

Dammit! That's why they were holding back on the telepath's power: they were waiting for us to enter the building and get within whatever exterior defense is blocking out our own telepaths' powers so that they could unleash them without anyone to block it.

This made two thoughts spring to Harry's mind. One, the telepath had to be found and eliminated in some fashion, and two, this building had to remain intact for the most part. The technology that could block out telepathic signals as well as the lower half of this building was doing right now was something that he and his people could use.

And probably keep to ourselves, he thought ruefully. After all, Harry had access to most of the known telepaths in the world at this point. Giving out this technology to a chosen few very worried individuals could be a good idea, but letting it propagate wouldn't be. But before that we need to win here, so I'd best get ready.

Even as he thought that, the Marauders moved in on the attackers, only to find Harry standing defensively over his team, and Psylocke standing over Nightcrawler and Magma. Thankfully for Psylocke, the trio of raiders was of a much lower priority than Harry and the assault team coming down from the roof. So only Gambit and one of the Prism clones was sent to deal with them.

The floor the trio were on was dominated by cubicle walls that barely were taller than their chests, giving only the illusion of privacy rather than the reality. Psylocke had wondered idly how anyone could work in a place like this before she felt felt the telepathic assault slamming into her mental defenses. She was barely able to beat it back, aided only by the fact that she had a bit more experience than whoever was attacking her, and the attacker had also split their attention. If not for that, Psylocke might have been overcome by the sudden mental battering, but, as it was, she was able to beat it off.

But by the time she had beaten the attack off and was once more cognizant of the world around her, Gambit was standing over her, his staff raised to plunge down towards her face with bone breaking force. "Sorry, chère," he said, his accent somewhat French, but not any of the accents she'd ever heard before. "But orders are orders, and you and yours have to die here."

But Psylocke didn't have to rely solely on her telekinetic or telepathic powers against physical assaults. She had, after all, been trained as one of the prime stars of Mojoworld and had hand-to-hand combat skills that ranked her among one of the better Custodes members. She twisted to the side, her foot lashing out towards his ankle before he'd even finished speaking.

Gambit stepped back quickly while bringing down his staff down in an arc to where her head was rather than where it would've been. But she had anticipated this in turn, and her hand flashed up covered in telekinetic energy to block the blow with a shield the size of her palm, sending the staff to one side as another telekinetic dagger appeared around her other hand, thrusting forward.

He dodged backwards again, and Prism took his shot. Yet Betsy saw him aiming at her and, with the wave of telepathic energy having dissipated, lashed out with her own mental assault at Prism. For just an instant she made him doubt his aim, and he checked fire, confused.

Then Gambit was in her face again, his staff barely missing her head only to smash into her upper arm with bone deadening force. She had felt that a bit, though she was wearing armor, and so it hadn't done all that much damage.

He blinked, shaking his head. "Those suits of yours, a man has to wonder where he could find one of his own, chère." He smirked, looking her up and down even as they traded blows. "Or get you out of it, one or the other."

"What can I say? Good sometimes does pay better than Evil," Psylocke quipped, ducking under a blow that would've taken her head off only to be forced into dodging backwards by the other end of his staff. It was apparent that Gambit realized after that one blow that the British woman's head was her only weak point.

"We're not evil, chère," Gambit said even as he moved in, his hand flashing out in a palm strike. "We're fighting the good fight! We're fighting for mutants, for mutant rights. You and Potter, you people only think you're doing the right thing, trying to work with the system rather than overthrow it. You have no idea how many hundreds of mutants have died despite your efforts, and the moment you no longer have anything new to offer the plebes, they'll turn on you all too."

"Spare me the sermon! If you think you're fighting the good fight, it's a tossup to say whether you are more delusional than you are blind!" she said with a grunt, as Gambit's next blow hit her in the stomach, driving some of the air out of her despite her armor. But she grabbed his staff and held it there, returning with a blow towards his chest with her own telekinetic energy sword, which he dodged at the last instant. He looked surprised when it cut a large gash through his armor, grimacing slightly, and she grinned at him cheekily before she moved to one side as if trying to dodge around him, causing Gambit to automatically move to block her escape.

This also placed him between Prism and Psylocke, which had been her intention, but not with the intention of protecting herself from the crystal form mutant. Now she swiftly lashed out, not with her telekinetic powers, but with her telepathic ones to impact Prism's mind, for just a second switching the image of Gambit and herself in his senses before the other telepath could sense her assault through the astral plane and lash out at her weakness.

For that brief instant it looked to Prism as if Gambit had maneuvered Psylocke so that her back was to him. And the crystal form murderer took his chance gleefully, blasting out a laser beam that slammed into Gambit, searing his back and head.

For just an instant Betsy could see his eyes widening, but he could couldn't dodge, and a bare second after the laser hit him, Gambit's head and upper body were seared away in the heat of the laser beam. As the rest of his body collapsed, Psylocke ducked underneath him, grabbing up his staff and hurling it forward with all of the telekinetic force she could, slamming it into Prism's chest. It didn't do much, but it did crack his crystal form just slightly at the point of impact.

He stumbled back, but before he could lash out towards her again, Harry appeared in the doorway and, with a single blasting spell, shattered him. "Are you all right?" he asked.

Psylocke nodded, getting to her feet slowly, shaking her head. "The others?"

"They were taken out by the telepathic assault. But I teleported them all back up to the roof. Without any of the telepaths here with us to help guard them, they can't face that kind of assault. And I can't spend the time it would take to bang up some wards to defend them from it magically. They'll help secure the perimeter and the exterior of the building, then find the energy field or whatever that is keeping Emma and the professor out of this fight."

So saying, he knelt down next to the two unconscious members, hissing as he saw the wound across Magma's head where she had smashed into a table as she fell and the vacant face Nightcrawler was showing. An instant later Magma's wound was healed, and both of the wounded warriors disappeared to join their fellows up on the roofs. "Right now it's just us, but the defenders seem to have mostly shot their bolt, at least in the exterior of the building. I think we need to move quickly to take advantage of that before they can try to pin us down again."

Psylocke nodded and fell into step with Harry. The two of them moved down, through the building, slightly more cautiously now, but still forging ahead quickly.

They ran into a few more defenders: Blockbuster and Harpoon at one point, Arclight and Scalphunter at another. But neither team could handle Harry's magic, and whenever they felt the impact of a new wave of telepathic power, Psylocke would be able to beat it off her, while Harry, his mind hidden under his cloak, barely felt it. He also still couldn't feel the telepathic link between himself and Jean, though, and that was beginning to piss him off as the minutes rolled by. He hadn't realized how dependent he himself had become to that link, and, with it gone, it was as if a part of Harry was missing.

They also began to run into what Harry had feared they might: pockets of former government employees turned into prisoners in their own offices and used as hostages. Twice Riptide and Harpoon were using them as human shields, which made them hard to deal with. And teleporting the prisoners outside to the street or up to the roof also slowed them down.

Outside, the flyers were still running into difficulty. A new enemy had appeared there at the same time that the telepath had launched her attack. This mutant looked like a massive flying ball of thermal and pyrokinetic energy, black and dark umber fire bursting out of a seeming suit of dark black armor complete with helmet. He announced himself with a blast of energy that nearly took Rogue out of the sky right off the bat, slamming her in the back and searing through her yellow armor with enough heat to cause her pain even if the blast was dissipated by her armor. "I am Reignfire, and I will end all of you! All of you will die for my master!"

He and Sunfire clashed then, the samurai roaring in behind a series of flame blasts. The beast didn't seem deterred by them at all and smashed bodily into the Japanese mutant, roaring out, "You! You were one of the first models, the secondary progenitor! Yet you fight against the master? Traitor, you are a quisling to your own species!"

"What? I assure you, creature, I have certainly not begotten any children, and most decidedly not one such as you!" the Japanese samurai shouted back, blasting the man with a salvo of pyrokinetic fire in the face, which only seemed to make Reignfire stronger.

"You do not see! It was your genes, yours and the one called Roberto Dacosta which created me. I am the two of you combined, perfected! Upon my master's command I will burn away the dead branch that is Homo Sapiens, searing the world so that only the those of the next evolution can survive under his command."

"Blimey," Banshee muttered as he flew behind the thing, hitting him with a supersonic scream and causing Reignfire to break off of his assault on Sunfire and turn to them. "This Sinister fellow's really got this whole brainwashing thing down to an art, doesn't he?"

Rogue announced herself again by blasting her way up from where she had crashed into the ground down below, thrusting her fists forward to slam a double-fisted blow into Reignfire's stomach, ignoring the heat and the wave of fire that wafted over her during the impact, only turning aside when she slammed him into a building, giving the pyro mutant a few cracked ribs for his troubles. He groaned aloud in pain but came back strong, smashing her away and then pushing out of the building she had embedded him into, some of the concrete and metal around him melting as he did.

From the side of the government building came more fire from within, and Rogue grumbled while looking over at Banshee for orders. "What should we do now? That guy's acting like he's on steroids or something, and now we have more defenders to deal with on top of him?"

But Banshee noticed the rest of the team on the roof and Kitty, moving down with her flying carpets to pick them up in groups. Thunderbird instantly grabbed his heavy cannon and began to fire at Reignfire, as did Colossus, while the carpet moved away from the building. She flew up to them, finding Cyclops looking only vaguely coherent, hiding his face behind one hand. "What happened to you, boyo?" Banshee asked, kneeling next to him and looking at him with concern.

"Telepathic assault, like what T'challa's men were dealing with before. They were waiting for us. Emma and Charles didn't beat them back; they pulled back on their own or under Sinister's command, not certain which, then waited behind some kind of dense shield that would keep them out," Cyclops muttered, still not looking at her, even as he let his hand fall away from his face to look at Banshee out of the corner of his well-protected eyes. "A fear-based assault. It took us all out except, I think, for Harry, and maybe Psylocke, since she's a telepath herself."

"Great," Rogue said brusquely, gesturing down towards where Reignfire had just slammed Sunfire into the side of the building with a blast of fire and was currently holding Rogue's arm, his hand on her armor beginning to hiss and spittle as he upped the heat. "We sure as hell could use the help here!"

Colossus nodded grimly and moved to the side of the carpet. "Get me directly above him," he ordered.

Cyclops nodded over to Kitty to follow Colossus's command while he tapped his headset. "Black Panther, we're cut off from pushing further," he said grimly, explaining what had happened. He then asked, "Can you get your recon drones over here and get us readings off of that building to tell us where that field is being generated from it or something?"

"I'll get my scientists on it," the Black Panther said instantly.

OOOOOOO

Within the building, Harry and Psylocke had continued to move down into the interior, cutting their way from one floor to another occasionally, sometimes taking the stairs, but always moving, never letting the defenders bog them down. Harry was now using his power more profligately, needing to make up for the loss of their fellows. And whenever the tidal wave of telepathic power subsided, Betsy would use her powers to scout around them to find enemies or prisoners.

They were now deep in the bowels of the building, and they hadn't seen any of the clones for the last few minutes, which caused Harry to ask, "How many floors has it been since we saw one of those Marauders?" He didn't like using the term, considering they weren't, after all, the first group of marauders he had known in his life, but when they shouted something along the lines of, 'We're the Marauders, and we're here to kill you,' every time you ran into a team of their clones, it tended to stick.

Psylocke thought, then said slowly, "I think four floors or so, something like that. And I think we're getting into Sinister's main base of operations. Certainly there's a lot more computers and stuff around, and…" She looked over at one of the doorways that they had bypassed by coming down through the roof, and Harry followed her gaze, noticing that the door had been metal and was one of the doors that would iris into the wall rather than on hinges.

Harry nodded then and gathered himself, casting several protective spells over Psylocke while also doing the same to himself, heightening his Magia Erebea spell to thirty percent. Given his powerup recently, he estimated that that would be enough to let him tangle with Colossus or the others, but not someone as strong as the Hulk. Still, he could up it to that level quickly enough, whereas when he had fought Thanos and the Hulk, most of his magic, around sixty percent, had been tied into the Magia Erebea spell.

Several minutes later they moved into a laboratory of some kind. Lines of computers with large screens covered the walls, a few dozen large glass containers sat around filled with the remains of different animals. At the far end of this lab, though, was a larger hatch, a massive metal construct. At its sides were two Gatling guns mounted on the wall, slowly traversing the short hall leading to it from the rest of the lab.

"After you, boss," Psylocke quipped, taking a step back and to one side so as to not be visible to whatever security system ran those guns.

"Can you tell if there are any minds behind that door?"

"None, or, if there are, they are blocking my senses," Psylocke replied.

"In that case, there's no need to be gentle any longer." Without further ado, Harry lashed out with the spell he liked to think of as his special doorknocker. "Fragor unda fortitudine!" A second later the door and the wall around it shattered into pieces, pieces which then exploded inwards.

With the doors and the guns protecting it gone, Harry led the way forward, magic still very visibly gathered around his hands as they walked into the unknown. At first the unknown behind that door didn't seem all that dangerous: it was again a lab with rows of destroyed computers interspersed with large glass containers, all of which were now shattered, blown apart by Harry's spell. But the lighting was bad, with only a bare bit of light coming in from the doorway they entered by and very few lighting fixtures visible in the ceiling. It was evident that, even at the best of times, this room was very dimly lit, if at all.

"Like something out of a sci-fi movie, this is. Sod this whole straight up assault lark. I'm not going to be cocked up by a face-hugger," Psylocke muttered, her normal upper-class accent dissipating for a moment before she took to the shadows to one side, ducking into them.

She did so very well indeed, almost disappearing even to Harry's senses. He idly wondered how she did that, but figured it was part of how she had been trained as the TV version of a ninja on Mojoworld.

He did agree with the sentiment, though, sending a nod in her direction even as he began to conjure small glowing lights and send them forth. Most of them were yellow, acting like little light bulbs in the air, flowing around the room and giving them so much light it was as if they were outside, almost. But two of them he created specially, whispering into them, "Seek!" before he let them fly off.

This was a spell he'd learned from the Camelot library in his rare down time, and one that had, ironically, been among the many prank spells the wizards here in this dimension had thought up. Those lights moved and bobbed among the others, seemingly without looking any different, until one of them moved to hover over a doorway leading into yet another room, and the other moved into the shadows to one side. An area, Harry realized, that didn't look as badly brutalized as the rest of the room was from his spell.

"Interesting," said a calm, almost urbane voice as Mr. Sinister himself stepped out of the darkness, his white skin practically glowing for a moment before he stepped into the light of the myriad magic balls. "Some kind of homing spell, I suppose. I'll say this for those of you who use magic, you can manipulate that mystical power to a far greater degree than most mutant powers could ever match, bar myself and perhaps a telekinetic. I wonder, do you think that makes you untouchable?"

Harry didn't respond verbally. Instead he lashed out with a spellchain: four cutting spells ending with Sectumsempra followed by three different variants of the entrails exploding curse, ending with a brute power lightning spell. The first was simply the usual entrails exploding curse, the second was a variant of the first centered on the eyeballs, and the third, filled your stomach with acid. The last spell was one of his basic lightning and Light-based spells, and it was the only spell he verbalized. "Drill of Light!"

Many of the other magic users he routinely interacted with would've blinked at the number of dark and painful spells that Harry had just launched. He was, after all, a good guy; Harry didn't normally use spells that killed his enemies in such incredibly painful manners. But Sinister had not only earned Harry's ire, he had earned his hatred.

Whatever his reasons, the man who was finally in front of Harry had tried to kidnap Harry's pregnant wife in all but name. He had launched this civil war during which thousands of innocents had died. He had been in control of the Mutant Liberation Front, which had indoctrinated more than a hundred young mutants worldwide into committing acts of terrorism. Any one of those reasons was enough for Harry to want to end this man's existence. All of them combined meant that he wanted it to be both quick and painful.

Sinister ducked aside, blasting at the visible magics that he could see with his own energy manipulation powers, creating concussive blasts of force from one hand and simpler energy blasts from the other. He took a step back and around one of the glass containers, which shattered as the eyeball exploding spell hit it. The last spell slammed into Sinister's chest, causing him to stumble backward as the energy of it hit him. But the lightning spell didn't do much, dissipating as if it had hit so much rubber.

He then returned fire, his hands both glowing purple as he shot out energy blasts. At the same time he lashed out with his limited telekinesis, grabbing up the various bits of debris that Harry's earlier spell had caused and hurling them at Harry from all around him.

Harry deflected them with a wave of his hand, tearing them from Mr. Sinister's control with an ease that Mr. Sinister had to blink in surprise at before Harry sent them right back at him. Sinister instinctively reached out again, grabbing at them and halting the various pieces of rubble-turned-shrapnel in the air, while Harry fought him for control, a sardonic, almost cruel smirk on Harry's face as he did. For a moment the rest of their fight stopped as both of them concentrated on controlling the debris, a visible sign of a struggle of will.

And then Psylocke announced herself by coming out of the darkness behind Sinister, her telekinetic blade suddenly glowing around one hand, which she aimed at the back of Sinister's head. He somehow sensed her, his own latent, entirely defensive ability with telepathy allowing him to sense her intent.

Turning quickly, Sinister grabbed her arm, twisted, and tossed her into the direction of the shrapnel that he and Harry had been fighting over, releasing his grip on it. But Harry was no fool, and the shrapnel moved around her, slamming into the walls and other containers like high-speed bullets while he teleported Psylocke away to another corner. There she scrambled again to hide behind one of the few remaining intact containers.

"You're not even going to let me get in a word edgewise?" Sinister said in the pause that followed this. "I thought you, at least, would wonder about my motivations, my reasons for doing what I have done."

Harry shook his head as he analyzed the way Sinister had dealt with his spells. Body transformation with the speed of thought, perhaps. energy manipulation which he can use to attack, and telekinesis. But not enough of anything to beat me. But he knows that, so where are his trump cards? "I know everything I want to know about you, Sinister. Your methods speak for themselves. What goal you are working towards, what reasons you think justify your actions, I could not care less about all of that. You tried to kidnap Jean, who is pregnant with our child. This is not going to end any other way but with your guts wrapped around your own fucking throat!"

Sinister grunted as another spell flew towards him, nearly hitting him before he could prepare himself, and he was forced to block it with a shield of concussive energy even as he hardened his body at the molecular level to take the blast. The spell, another lightning spell, struck and blasted through his shield but couldn't damage Sinister's currently rubber-like skin. But the next spell was another new spell that simply shot a nasty kind of acid at its target. The acid worked, since Sinister didn't know its composition enough to change his molecular structure enough to defend against it.

While outwardly he was still sneering at Harry, inside Sinister grimaced at the pain even as his body shifted to face it. He then ducked under another cutting spell, which he knew his body would not have been able to evolve fast enough to stop. "Magic users!" he grunted in annoyance. Magic was always very tricky to deal with, and while he could stop one set of spells at a time or perhaps two, given his general durability and ability to ignore concussive spells or exploding spells and others of that nature, that still left far too many spell types that could get through his durability, and he didn't want to test that durability if he didn't have to.

However, I have prepared for this. He smirked, stepping back to one side, and shouting, "Now, my dear queen!"

At that shout another telekinetic's power reached out through the room, pulling up panels from the ground and revealing votive offerings of some kind in small niches here and there. They flew into the air under the 'queen's' command, and they immediately began to glow with a bright blue light as Harry continued to throw out magic towards Sinister. Magic which stopped abruptly as Harry gasped, his magic once more almost seeming to try to fight him just like it had during his fight with MODOK.

"You're not the first magic user I've had to deal with, and though I would've preferred to have Le Fay here to help me deal with you, that only meant I had to fall back on more creative means," Sinister said calmly, stepping out from behind his hiding place and moving forward. A blast from one hand caught Psylocke as she tried to once again attack him from behind, slamming her back and through a wall with concussive force. The shields around her had instantly faded from the power of the votive offerings, just like the magic-stopping artifact Harry had already dealt with before. But her catsuit was also armored internally with Orichalcum scales, and she could take this kind of punishment fairly well.

She pushed herself out of the rubble groggily, quickly turning around to see what was happening inside the laboratory. The purple-haired woman didn't even notice that she had been smashed into another kind of laboratory lined with larger glass containers. These contained nothing at present, but each was labeled with the name of a different Marauder, starting with Arclight and Scalphunter and moving down in two long rows against the walls. But instead of noticing this she watched Harry, fearful as to what could happen now that his magic had been shut down. But she needn't have worried.

As the magic of the offerings tried to attack Harry, the bracelet Hela had crafted for him began to glow with a fierce purple and yellow light on his wrist, offsetting the anti-magic Blessing on the Catholic relics with its own from Hela. "Did you think I didn't know how vulnerable I was to religious blessings like that?" Harry asked sardonically, taking in a single breath as he recovered from the momentary pain. "I still have no idea how to combat them myself, but I don't have to. I have a certain goddess by my side, after all."

With the same hand on which the bracelet was glowing, Harry gestured and sent out four Reducio spells, each one slamming into a different idol, shattering them. And with his own magic having the added taste, as it were, of Hela's Blessing, one that was far newer and more powerful than the ones on the votive offerings, the Blessings within the offerings also shattered.

Sinister saw this happening and unleashed his next surprise, even as he knew he had lost his best chance at winning this fight. "I need you, my queen!"

From the alcove where Harry's second homing light ball had hovered, a woman strode. She was somewhat tall with a svelte frame, wearing something that looked a cross between a super villain costume and lingerie: black leather bustier, the lower half cut like a bathing suit in that it showed her legs from her upper thighs down, with a long V neck to it, the edges of which barely covered her nipples. The black leather was marked by spikes on the shoulders and wide metal teeth around where the leather covered her upper arms. Against her white skin the black leather was most striking, as was the red hair which encompassed her head, with a certain wild, unkempt appearance to it. On her hands she wore skintight gloves, and her boots were black leather as well, complete with stiletto heels.

But it was her jade eyes and her face that caused Harry's next round of attacks to stumble to a halt, because they were very familiar to Harry, as familiar as those of his other loves'. "What…the…bloody hell…is…this…" he intoned slowly as he stared at the woman.

She sneered back at him and lashed out with a telekinetic lash that lifted Harry up and hurled him back through the ruined hatchway into the rest of the office beyond, slamming him through one of the desks there to embed him in the wall. With a wrench of magical power Harry released himself from her grip even as she began a direct telepathic assault, only to frown in fury. "Even with him right in front of me like this I can't even find his mind, my love!"

"Then we must do this the old-fashioned way, my dear Madelyne," Sinister said, while Psylocke slowly slunk to the ground, forgotten by both of the villains for the moment as she stared at this weird, twisted mirror image of Jean Grey.

But even as that fight was going on, Cyclops and Thunderbird had begun to pressure the remaining defenders. A very visible sign of this was the exterior energy grid that had somehow blocked the two telepaths out from the building suddenly shutting off as the two villains began their attack on Harry. The Jean Grey look-alike stared around her as she felt that, scowling. "They found the Grounding Device! Should I retreat to our throne hall?"

"NoGH!" Sinister said even as he blocked a magical assault from Harry that would have carved his chest out. Instead it blasted him off his feet, and he stared as Harry walked back into the lab looking not even winded from the earlier assault. He simply powered through Mr. Sinister's own attacks as if they weren't even there, not allowing Sinister to even glance in the woman's direction. "I need your help here!"

Nodding, the Jean look-alike lashed out with her own telekinetic powers, trying to grab at Harry on the one hand while creating flaming demons and gremlins to attack him, tearing at the debris all around her and hurling it at Harry at the same time.

Harry blocked it all almost automatically while staring back at her as he shook his head slowly. "So, it's not just those Marauders that you can clone, Sinister?"

Harry had long known that this man had designs on Jean. He had known that Sinister liked to play god, cloning his most useful followers and then using them as pawns. But he had not connected those two concepts before this. Cloning the Marauders was one thing in Harry's mind, since they all were serial killers, and Harry felt, after talking to Mystique, that they had all agreed to follow Sinister, if not the cloning aspect.

But this, knowing that Sinister had cloned one of the loves of his life, made Harry realize anew the depths of Sinister's deceit. He not only played with the very bedrock of life, DNA, but also had no care for the individuality of his victims or their personal selves. Cloning Jean like this, manipulating the clone like this, it was almost like pseudo-raping her without touching the original at all.

As he thought of this and stared at this Jean-who-was-not-Jean, Harry's self-control slipped its leash. A magical aura sprang into being around him fit to nearly blind those who saw it as he roared, "HOW DARE YOU!?"

With that shout, Harry blasted out a massive cone of sheer brute force magic which annihilated all of Sinister's and the look-alike's attacks before smashing into them both like a runaway comet, hurling them backwards. Another spell exploded between the two of them even as they were still flying backward from the power of the first, and Madelyne's projected course was changed so that she slammed into one wall while and Sinister hit the other. Both of them recovered quickly, but now they were not in a position to be able to support one another.

Yet, even as he launched this attack, Harry was aware that the link between him and Jean, the real Jean, his Jean, was back. And her astral projection was was in his mind, clamoring for attention. "Harry, what the hell happened?! You… Hela's here and she said you were taking the fight to Sinister, but then our link… I, we got cut off, my love. It woke me up, and I… How, I mean, are you all right!?"

Relief, anger, and a lot of worry came through the link from Jean, so much so that Harry was worried about what the physical ramifications of her being so badly startled might be. It wasn't uncommon, after all, for high emotions like that to impact a woman's pregnancy, and that didn't even factor Jean's powers into the equation. "Calm down, Jean. I'm still here. I'm not even hurt, frankly. Sinister's developed some technological means to block out all psychic power, something we're going to have to look into. I'll tell you more about what's been going on here, but for now I need to concentrate on the world around me for a bit. I promise I'll be up to see you as soon as I can."

"You better, mister," Jean replied, soothed by the feelings of love and affection as well as determination that Harry had pushed through their link.

She faded to be replaced by the feeling of Emma, though, unlike Jean, she didn't project her astral self into his mind. Rather, she was simply there: waiting, maintaining their connection, but waiting for Harry to start talking to her rather than vice-versa. "Emma, I've just run into the telepath you've been fighting. She's away from the device she was using to up her power. Look through my eyes for a moment."

Emma did so, and Harry could feel her shock through their telepathic connection, her self-control having disappeared for a second. "Wh, how, what the hell… A clone, he cloned Jean. But then why…"

"There are mysteries here, mysteries we'll have to discover later. But right now, do you think you and Charles can do something about her? I don't want to kill her if I can help it. I have a feeling she's been indoctrinated almost as heavily as Hela was to play her role before we freed her."

"We can try, at least," Emma said into Harry's mind. With that the two telepaths began an assault on this clone of Jean Grey. But they were hampered both by the distance and by the lingering effects of the defensive field. There was also the odd fact that her telepathic presence in the astral plane was so small and thus difficult to target, yet another mystery.

And they couldn't quite do it. Jean Grey, or Madelyne as Sinister had called her, stiffened as their assault began, shouting out, "The telepaths are attacking again! I have to get to the throne room!" Before Sinister could say anything, she had turned and moved in the direction she'd come from, mentally fighting for her life against this new assault, almost ignoring the physical world around her.

Once more Psylocke saw her chance and lunged forward, body checking the other woman to the ground. The two of them rolled through the debris of the lab, with Madelyne getting cut here and there by pieces of glass and shards of metal, which Psylocke's body suit ignored. They ended up with Psylocke unfortunately below Madelyne, who had used her telekinetic powers to flip them at the last instant. The redhead slammed the other woman down with a hand on her chest, pressing her down as if her hand was the same weight as an elephant. At the same time more telekinetic energy gathered in her fist to come down like a giant hammer.

But then the unexpected occurred. Below the redhead, Psylocke, her head ringing, winked up at her. "Hey, beautiful." It was so out there, so random, that it froze Madelyne for a second as the purple-haired woman had hoped. Then Psylocke's hand flashed up, slamming a telepathic blade up into the other woman's chin and then up into her brain.

This blade wasn't like most of the ones Psylocke used. It was telepathic in nature, barely having enough telekinetic presence to make the outer edge of the odd dagger shape that was visible in the physical world. If she had hit any other body part with a blade like this, it wouldn't have done more than bruise, if that. But she had thrust it up into Madelyne's brain and released the idea the telepathic part of the blade contained: pain.

That pain lit up in Madelyne's head, and she screamed before a blow from Psylocke to the stomach caused her to double over the other woman. There Psylocke grabbed her head in both hands and then slammed her head into the ground next to her, knocking her out.

Then Psylocke rolled out from underneath her, shaking her head loosely and thinking that maybe she had her own slight concussion from where the woman had smashed her down to the ground in the first place. Still, I think my part in this fight is over.

Elsewhere, without Madelyne to back him up, Sinister could barely last long enough to realize that his aid was down, and that only because of his ability to change his body to match the elemental attacks that were Harry's preference. But when Harry, in his anger about Sinister's cloning of Jean, began to use pure magical assaults to go with his acid-based and Darker spells, the fight ended within seconds. Nothing Sinister could do could give him the magical durability to withstand these spells.

A magical blast of acid struck Mr. Sinister while his body was still configured to handle electrical and other elemental attacks, and it seared straight through his body's remaining durability, starting to burn from the inside. The entrails spell latched on as the albino scientist was trying to force his body to deal with that assault.

Mr. Sinister screamed as his own insides began to broil, the magic he'd been hit with fighting him for control. It was only his manipulation of his body at a molecular level that kept him going at that point, and that wasn't a mercy as Harry started forward to end him. "Blackfyre!" Harry growled, and the almost-living fire of the Black family struck, immolating Mr. Sinister from the waist up, his upper body ceasing to exist, the fire was so hot.

As his legs fell to the side, Harry stared at them, then judiciously conjured up more flame, and then still more, until the entire area of the lab where Sinister had fallen was burned to so much ash. Watching, Psylocke coughed delicately and asked solicitously, "Ahem, um, are you all right, boss?"

"I'm just fine," he said, smiling somewhat manically over at her. "I just believe in being thorough, that's all."

"Riiight," Psylocke drawled, then slowly got to her feet to face the door as the sound of racing feet reached their ears.

Thankfully, however, it was Cyclops who led the way into the room with the rest of the team behind him. All of them stopped and stared at the shocking red hair in among the rubble as Psylocke hauled the unconscious woman that Sinister had called Madelyne to her feet. "What the… Wait, clones," Cyclops said coldly, shaking his head. "Right. I hope that Sinister is dead now?"

"Very dead," Harry said with a nod, gesturing to his feet where literally nothing remained, even the metal and wood of the floor having been burned to nothing. Even as he did so, Harry felt tired. Not physically—Sinister had honestly not been much of a threat alone—but rather his mind and emotions were tired. It's been a long fucking day. And I want to see Jean and the others. But damn me if I don't still have work to do. "Now we have to deal with the fallout…"

OOOOOOO

General Petronov of the 2nd army group walked into the reserve headquarters of the Belorussia Reserve Guard's largest base near the Polish border, glaring angrily all around him as he did so. Nowhere was there the haste and energy that he had expected to see, and he growled angrily to himself as he marched into the commanding officer's office, marched up to that general's desk, and slammed his hands down on it. "What kind of game are you playing at, General Koso!"

The man at the desk was far smaller than he was and had nothing of his lean, athletic build, being rather dumpy for a soldier, which fit his being a reserve soldier rather than a serving officer. He looked up at the other man unflinchingly, however. "I am doing nothing, as you can see. No orders have come through from our local representative that would require me to aid you and your forces."

"The invaders are but hours away from the border, and you will play these political games! You will follow my orders as President Turpin has ordered in times of war, or else I will have you shot for disobedience in the face of the enemy!"

"Nyet, I will not," the other man said with a thin smile. "Not until you prove you're not an alien."

For a moment the general's eyes widened, and then he blustered, "What?" accompanied by a reasonable expression of simple shock. "What do you mean, an alien? What madness is this, or is this some plot from the Poles? Have they bought you off that you would spout such nonsense!?"

"An alien," the man across the desk said simply. "I have seen evidence being passed about through the grapevine and over the interweb, which is once more open to us, I might add, that Russia has been duped into doing the work of aliens as that British magic user, Potter, has been warning of. Certainly, that makes more sense than our use of a weapon that would've taken the entire world back into the ice age!"

There the general's tone turned angry, and he glared at Petronov, or perhaps the alien wearing his skin. "Even we Russians, who pride ourselves on enjoying winter, would not have enjoyed such a thing."

"Such talk proves your treason!" Petronov barked, gesturing his two guards forward.

"The treason is only on those who willingly work with the aliens, if they exist. And what will allaying my fears that you are not one cost you, comrade?" the man asked, putting a sardonic lilt on the last word.

Four other men entered the room. Two of them were guards carrying guns, the other two were carrying crude looking, cobbled-together devices built around a set of infrared goggles, pointing them at the general and his two guards. "This will but take a moment," Koso replied. "And then, if you are human, perhaps I will start following your orders. That will depend upon the orders, of course."

Before the two men could activate their devices, Petronov's guards whipped up their guns and shot them and their guards in a blast of machine gun fire before turning back to the general in his seat.

Koso, however, had already slammed his hand on a button underneath his desk's top, and one wall of his office opened, revealing rows of other troopers with submachine guns in hand. Without any order from Koso, they rained a bullet hell into the room, killing both the Army general and his two guards. As Koso and his men watched, the three new bodies slowly began to dissipate as they hit the floor, and the Belorussian pushed himself out of his chair, moving around his desk to lean down and watch as it occurred before shaking his head and looking over at his men. "Well, I suppose that proves the story of aliens, yes?"

More than one of the men there looked a little shocked, but many of them simply nodded. And the general straightened up. "Get the word out! We have our proof. No Belorussian will be an alien's tools! It might well be time for a glorious revolution."

OOOOOOO

Harry's demand to surrender was heard by every individual on the small island as night fell. "To the Mutant Liberation Front members among you. You have been duped, lied to. Mr. Sinister is dead, his cloned followers, the Marauders are dead. He posed as the High Genegineer as well as your leader and played both sides of this battle against one another, not in an attempt to conquer this island but to entrap myself and my team. He failed. I say again, you have been lied to. Please surrender. No one else needs to die today. No one else needs to die for this man's madness."

Something in his words got through to many of the Mutant Liberation Front members. They slowly came over the lines, moving to the port city and surrendering, simply sitting around the outer edge of the shield that was still there, their hands in their laps. With Sinister dead, the Mutant Liberation Front was now headless, and with the majority of the Marauders dead, they no longer even had most of their cell leaders. With that, they lacked anyone who could light a fire under them to continue the fight. That and a lot of them had already begun to question how things were going as this civil war had bogged down.

But the Press Gang were still determined to fight on. The rank-and-file of them were filled with mutant haters, the easier for Sinister to control and aim them once he seized power and started to hand out his toys to them. But there weren't many of them left, not after having pushed most of their forces into the city in an effort to overwhelm the Wakandan and marine forces there. And there Harry's golem army had ground most of them to powder during half a day of blood and slaughter, of metal and flesh against endless stone and concrete.

Harry would leave Thunderbird and Cyclops behind with the rest of the team here to deal with the remainder, however.

"And what will you be doing?" Cyclops asked sardonically as he looked at a map of the island which Emma was updating with the locations of the various holdout groups of the Press Gang and a few random civilian gangs who were ravaging the countryside here and there. Though few in number, they too would have to be dealt with.

"I'm going to return up to High Note and talk to Jean. Before that, I'll put Madelyne in stasis for a time until we figure out what's going on there and what we want to do with her. Beyond that…" Harry shook his head, sighing faintly as he looked, not at the map of Genosha, but out over the dark waters beyond the port, where the lights of incoming ships could be seen in the dark. "The war's over. Now we work for peace and hope that doing so is not as hard as winning the war was."

End Chapter

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And there you have it folks, the shortest ATP chapter I have done in a LOOOOOoooong time. But considering the change in tune of this segment in comparison to what happens now the war's over, it's justified. Not to say the peace will be simple of course, LOL. Anyway, hope you all liked the curb stomping of Sinister, since, when you get right down to it, he just couldn't face Harry after all his traps had failed. The instant a cockroach comes out to the light, it gets crushed. His planning was excellent, his traps very well laid, right up until the end. But thanks to Hela helping Harry with his one weakness, Harry just brute forced his way through them all.

Thanks for reading and as always please leave a review.