The X-Men aren't mine.

I'm making this a real disclaimer, because it's very important to realize that there is going to be an incredibly amazing amount of violence in the following chapter, and this story is about to earn it's rating. So... um... just be prepared. *hides behind really really thick bullet proof glass wall*.


Dysis stood at the entrance to her stronghold. It was a monster of a room, cold steel that was as vast as it was empty. There was a door, approximately twenty feet tall, ten feet wide, and at least two and a half feet thick, also steel. The room was nearly impenetrable. Should it be entered, there were walls in the ground about one hundred feet from the entrance, just big enough to cover a knelt man, with a slit for looking and pointing a gun. Located behind each of these fifty walls were two men, mostly recently acquired souls she drained of any sort of willpower to use in her "test run", and all armed to the teeth. She sat at the very back of the room, approximately three hundred feet from the entrance, and thirty feet above the ground. She was located behind a seemingly timid, but nearly indestructable transparent wall of her own destruction, which protected her as well as a control panel and several monitors.

The first monitor, activated by a motion detector, flicked into view. About thirty stylish cars drove up to her gate. Five men stepped out of the first car and walked towards her entrance. One of the men stepped forward, pressing a button on an intercom. Before he could even say anything, the door to the stronghold opened to him. None of the five men had a chance to move before behind mowed down by gunfire. The remaining cars sped into the room, weaving in as far as they could reach before swinging the doors open and using them as their own barriers. Automatic machine gun fire reached Dysis' men before they even saw their opponents and richoceted off each barrier. It was only moments before the air was littered with bullets, slamming into both sides heavily, but clearly not on the hometeam's advantage. The brainwashed drones had little experience with handling weaponry, and though they fought adamently, simply could not compare to the raw experience and skill of some of the men that they were trading shots with. Fontaine had been in the middle of the battle, pulling off shots with the eyes of an hawk, never missing a fatal shot. It was only after his second reload that he noticed the woman sitting in the back of the room. He noticed that despite the fact that her forces were dying in front of her eyes, she had a smile on her face that nothing seemed to be able to diminish.

Fontaine's men simply swarmed over the last ten or so 'zealots', disarming them and tossing them into the center of the group.

Fontaine stepped forward boldly. He had removed his sling to attempt to be more forceful in his actions, and in an effort to strengthen his image, focused the pain to allow himself to sound even more angry than he could ever indicate. "You are Dysis, aren't you?" his voiced commanded to her.

Without faltering for a moment, she pulled a microphone to her lips. "You are an intuitive one, aren't you? Yes, yes I am Dysis. I assume you got my 'message', judging by the overwhelming positive response." She said these last few words with and even bigger smile on her lips. "I can also assume by that little indignant tone you've taken with me that you have something against what I did, or some other moral issue you want me to become enlightened on." Her chair rotated and placed her so her hand was just above a switch. "You might want to save the speech for a little while - I haven't even begun to test your morals yet." Fingers danced over the button for a moment, then slowly slid it down. A fairly large capsule, about seven feet long and three feet in diameter lowered from the cieling. It was translucent, but the image inside was recognizable only as a dark haze.

The ten men who had been disarmed stood up. Hypnotically, they stood in two lines of five each and walked towards the capsule. Knowingly working the controls, one pressed several buttons on a keypad and smoke hissed from the capsule. Each took a place and assisted in lifting the cover off the capsule, rotating it vertically at the same time. A figure removed itself from the capsule and stood, allowing the smoke to disipate from around his body.

Fontaine mouthed the word Touch, taking a step forward as if it was something only he could see. Touch focused his gaze on Fontaine, coldly and with almost no recognition. His eyes were vacant and empty holes, with a shimmer of brown in each barely visible. His physical form looked the same, with the exception of his eyes, and yet every person in the room took a step back when he took a step forward.

The sound of one gun cocked. Then five, and soon every gun had a bullet chambered and safetys were off. Hundreds of guns pointed at Touch. Fontaine nervously held his own gun at his former friend, and yelled above the crowd. "If he moves... shoot him."

Without hesitation, Touch ran at them, only to be greeted by every single gun going off, letting loose every single round and magazine that was loaded. As the smoke settled and the clanging from the bullets hitting the ground died down, Touch was standing just inches from the barrels of the guns from the front of the pack, completely unscathed.

His hand touched the gun in front of his face, and gently lowered it to the man's side with absolutely no resistance. "You don't need to be afraid of me," Touch said calmly, with the brown specks in his eyes glowing slightly. "You need to be afraid of him." The two looked to the man's left simultaneously, and where there had been his brother, the man only saw a hideous, gangly, insect-like monster pointing a gun at him. The man with the gun pointed at him already had his gun drawn, as a similar monster had just drawn a weapon on him. Fontaine watched without understanding as the two men who had known each other their entire lives were threatening each other with death. He backed away from the scene, and as if his removal from the center was a trigger, the men around him, his family, were turning their guns against each other screaming. Fontaine ran backwards, as the images of the insects blurred with his images of the humans he knew and cared about.

Illusions, he thought. Touch was doing this to them.... He turned away from Touch and flat out ran to the door, hearing the curses and threats from men he'd worked beside, laughed with and helped out. He reached the back wall and pressed himself against it, the image of his bretheren as these monsters fading in and out of his mind. Touch took a few steps back and raised his hand to the first man he had spoken to, who released a bullet from his gun into the chest of his brother. Just as the body hit the ground, he lifted the illusion so the man could see his brother drop to the ground, just before another man loaded a bullet into his head. The first shot had set off a chain reaction, launching bullets only feet away from each other for nearly instant kills. The sounds of the bullets were only muted slightly by the screams of horror that were let out when the mask Touch had placed on them was pulled away for a moment to see the horrible act they had committed, seconds before their own lives were ripped away from them. The barrage of bullets became so intense that there was not even time for the fear of the illusions to be pulled away before death took each man away. It was less than a minute before only three souls were left tied to the mortal coil - Fontaine, Touch, and Dysis.

Needless to say, the latter of this trio was thrilled to see how perfectly her experiment had gone. The alteration of his body to act as almost a giant antenna for his powers altered everything about him, even down to putting him into a submissive state of control. She had commanded him to kill them all... and judging by his calm, unassuming gait towards Fontaine, he was just about to finish his mission.

As Touch approached him, Fontaine saw his trench coat split behind him, forming gigantic demonic wings that nearly spanned the room. The specks for brown which dotted his eyes grew and solidified, forming large pools of copper, the first of the changes which molested his face into a zombie-like state of its former self. His hands mutated, melting his fingers together to form three solid bony claws. Similar demonic changes occured all over his body until he resembled some sort of... angel of death.

He stood a few feet away from Fontaine now, who was locked in place with nowhere to go. This associate of his -- this friend -- had become a horribly mutated creature before his eyes. Though his legs were like stone, his entire body shook. Touch's hand snapped out and wrapped around his neck. The pain was unbelievable, and pulsed throughout his entire body. He knew that the image was just an illusion, but he could feel the bony claws, and his breathing was so strained he could barely maintain consciousness, let alone say anything to disuade the killing machine.

The struggle to keep his eyes open was proving to be a losing battle, until he locked them on the copper-like surface of Touch's. The illusion was so powerful, he could even see his own reflection, and a slight sparkle in his own eyes. He must be in my mind if he's doing this Fontaine realized. He began running thoughts in his head of job's they pulled together, drinks they've shared, jokes they've told... anything he could pull out. The more he thought, the weaker Touch's grip became.

A...An... Andy... Touch sputtered into Fontaine's mind. The wings seemed to bleed together, running into the form of a trenchcoat. The bones crushing his throat seperated into fingers merely touching the throat. His body finally shifted back towards it's normal form, but the last thing to change were his eyes. They went back to the vacant holes holding a shimmer of brown, but the brown glowed more intensely than before.

A wind swept behind him, and Dysis almost appeared behind his shoulder. "What do you think you're doing?" she questioned, her voice manipulative and her eyes glowing yellow and pink, coursing her control of emotion throughout his entire body, bending him to her will. He turned to face her, the brown in his eyes glowing with an even greater intensity than before. He tried to reject her influence, but his body had been altered, her presence almost welcome within him. "Don't you see?" she spoke with the authority of one having complete control over another life. "You were made to suit my wishes... your body is forever under my command, and it has changed you down to your core. To put it in a crude way.... I own your ass." It was at this moment she realized that she had been talking to Touch... but the shimmer had completely left his eyes.

Her eyes locked onto Fontaine's. She caught the sparkle of brown in his eyes. He cleared his throat.

"Boo."

His foot connected into her jaw and sent her flying backwards, though she caught herself with gust of wind. As she lowered herself to the ground, she threw a fireball in Fontaine/Touch's direction, which he adeptly rolled out of the way of, pulling the trench coat off of the now lifeless body of Touch's old body and taking off out the door. Dysis flew into the air and rushed out after them. She combed the mountains, searching for any sign of them but finding nothing.

"WHERE ARE YOU TOUCH!?" her voice boomed through the mountain range. The wind that wrapped around her body spread with a hurricane-like force, slamming into the landscape with a fury unseen by any normal weather pattern. Despite the roar of the air whipping around her, her eyes still picked up a figure among the branches that had been stripped of their leaves by the force of her winds. Her eyes turned into a bluish white, and she slowly froze his body, until everything below his waist was nothing but an ice sculpture.

Dysis landed on the ground next to Fontaine's figure, rolling it onto it's back. The body, though badly damaged, was still alive, with it's eyelids closed tightly. Her fingers spread the lids apart and she stared into his blue eyes, lacking any sort of shimmer. Her ferocity grew to an uncontrollable level. She grabbed his face and closed her eyes, feeling the cold travel from her finger tips into his body, literally chilling him into the core of his body. Fontaine could not scream, because the cold entering his body had decimated his lungs. He could not try to shake away, because the cold froze his brainstem within seconds of having her touch him. He could not do anything, for she had frozen his entire body. Her eyes snapped open suddenly, burning red and orange, and she slammed heat into his body, almost instantly destroying his body where it lay in a more painful manner than even she could imagine.

"If you are around Touch, I know you must have felt that too," she spoke into the woods. "Consider that my promise to you. No one has ever escaped me. Your victory is temporary. Don't be as cocky as to consider yourself the first just yet." A wind picked up around her and swept her back towards her stronghold.

* * *


Five hours later, a hermit left his cabin. Walking around a lake, hee came across the ruins that were the body of Fontaine and knelt next to them for a few moments. Carefully removing the trench coat from the ashed ruins of the man, he placed the coat on himself and walked away. As he returned back around the lake, he caught his reflection in the calm waters of the lake. Barely being dawn, the reflection was mostly a shadow, minus the copper glimmer bouncing off the cool water towards the head of the figure.