Note: Although I actually like the TAS version better, the original line was, "Well, bub, Wolverine is virtually unkillable. Wolverine's claws are adamantium, the strongest metal known - capable of slicin' through vanadium steel like a hot knife through butter." That of course from Wolverine, scaring the bejeezus out of a Hellfire Club lackey during the Dark Phoenix Saga.
And yeah, I think X23 could do what Wolverine (in "Day of Reckoning") couldn't. HYDRA had her for fourteen years. That equals a lot of destruction...
Everything was going fine until the alarms sounded.
When they did, X23 was paused, crouching, at a junction in a hallway midway down the long shaft of the factory building. She was carefully timing the sweep of a security camera that she was going to have to avoid if she wanted to remain undetected, and fingering the remaining neural scramblers in her inner pocket that were going to knock out the rest of the guards in her path.
The stimulus overload of sudden flashing lights and blaring sound scrambled her senses for a split second; she almost lost her balance, but fourteen years of HYDRA training kept her steady.
She recovered just as fast and couldn't suppress an angry growl. She hadn't set off the alarms, she knew that. She was far too cautious. The most likely culprit was Rachel-with-short-red- hair, doing something stupid to the guards who'd hauled her away. X23 had not been counting on Rachel going quietly, not exactly, but her plans rarely fell apart altogether and it set her blood to boiling that this one had. Now every guard would be alerted. Now every Sentinel would be alerted.
That sent prickles of fear shivering down her spine along with the usual adrenaline. Fear was something she didn't get a lot of in battle; it was impossible to be afraid of things that she had destroyed over and over and over in training. She could only fear what she hadn't been trained to fight.
She hadn't trained against Sentinels.
X23 shook off the fear the way she shook off injury and sprinted down the corridor with its now-meaningless camera. She would proceed with her plan and deliver the EMP generator to the centermost point of the bottom level. There she would trigger it and fry every circuit within twenty miles, including the complex wiring of the Sentinels. The hoards of data on Trask's computers would become so much dust.
She'd lost the element of surprise - she'd lost her ambush - but she could still run her prey down. She would have to. The stammering junior SHIELD officer had been very specific: It would happen within the next twenty-four hours. Judging from what she'd seen since infiltrating the base, it would happen much sooner than that. She was in fact beginning to think that she might have missed the deadline after all.
But it was too important. It was more important than her escape, or destroying HYDRA one facility at a time. It was something that Wolverine would have done. It was her chance at redemption - it was her chance to save a world that, she had begun to dimly perceive, she was a part of.
And above all of that, it was her chance to secure her own survival for another handful of days.
The guards she'd been trying to avoid stepped out into her path, and she lost precious minutes fighting past them. Protecting the EMP generator added a layer of difficulty that she had to compensate for, and then she made it harder on herself by trying not to kill. She was supposed to kill - it was faster and cut down on nasty surprises later. But Wolverine hadn't killed in years and still managed to be efficient. She was curious, if she could be curious about anything, to see what it would be like to not kill during a mission. She wanted to outdo him.
His record would stand for a while, though, because she finally lost her patience and stabbed the last guard through the chest. Blood gurgled up and she pulled back her claws quickly, stepping away before the crimson could splash all over her. The scent would stick with her and be more of a distraction than an incentive.
The guard slumped to the floor and she ran on, trying to remember where she was. The factory was a huge rectangular shaft that went down for several hundred meters, surrounded by auxiliary buildings that were only on the surface. What she wanted was a fast way down, but the alarm probably meant that the entire base was locked down tight and filling with armed guards. She could fix that.
She stopped cold in the middle of the hallway and pulled the remote detonator from one of her jacket's many deep pockets. A press of her thumb and the explosives she'd scattered around the auxiliary buildings blew all at once. Another press, and the same thing happened to the explosives placed more carefully inside the main generator building.
The lights went out.
They came back on immediately, of course, but not all of them; the flashing red alarm lights were gone, and most of the normal fluorescents too. Also missing was the screeching, incessant klaxon, for which her hypersensitive ears were grateful. The factory held a backup power station on one of its many levels; it would keep the emergency lights on for hours. Or until the EMP blast hit.
Having evened the odds slightly - not that she thought about it that way; it was just another trick she had been taught to perform - X23 made her way down the corridor to the point where it terminated. A jutting platform ringed with a tall railing. She could see the floor; it was roughly four hundred meters down, too far to jump without incurring substantial injury. She didn't have time for injury.
She vaulted over the railing, popped her hand claws, and let gravity pull her down the wall in a controlled slide. On the way down she heard guards shouting, saw them gesturing at her, and realized she was about to get a big obstacle thrown in her path.
It didn't matter. She had a mission to complete and only her own death could stop her.
She hit the ground and bent her knees to take the impact, retracted her claws at the same moment. The guards opened fire halfheartedly; they were too far away to hit her and they knew it. She knew it too, and didn't duck or move to shield herself. Instead she stood her ground and looked up at the sound that was descending towards her. The obstacle. She smelled fuel and oil and hot metal - the perfume of a hundred thousand days in HYDRA training.
The Sentinel fired its retrorockets and made an incongruously graceful touchdown. The floor, empty except for X23, shook anyway. Its glowing yellow eyes flashed momentarily brighter and it took a first step in her direction, making a loud, metallic thud echo across the floor.
She ran straight for it.
The action wasn't as suicidal as it seemed. The key against defeating large opponents wasn't strength, but speed. When the element of surprise was lost, a small fighter had to rely on her speed, her instinct, and her temper. X23 had all three in abundance, plus the experience to make them useful.
She aimed for the space between the Sentinel's ponderous metal legs, jumped, tucked her feet up, and stretched her arms out. The claws on her right hand did little more than superficial damage, but she scored a good hit on the other leg, her claws biting deep into the metal, then landed in an practiced crouch behind the robot.
The Sentinel turned, but X23 was already darting around its ankles again, this time jumping to inflict a gouge on the upper outside portion of the right leg. Right now she had a plan to whittle the robot down while protecting the precious cargo on her back. In a few minutes, fueled by adrenaline and the pain of a few broken bones, the plan would disappear into a fog of blood-red, pounding rage, and then the Sentinel would really be in trouble.
She ducked a poorly-aimed blast from the Sentinel's hand - wide-spectrum lasers didn't pack much of a punch anyway - and, dodging more blasts, put some distance between them. Making it walk, just like making it shoot at her, would force it to burn fuel; the things didn't come with an unlimited supply. No robot did.
She stopped in the shadow of the big hydraulic lift, which had been frozen a few levels up and abandoned. The Sentinel caught up with her a few moments later and they traded blows in a dance that X23 played out with consummate skill.
Her heart was pounding, her blood was running hot, and she reveled in the violence. This was what she did. This was her. HYDRA might have given her the training and the tools, but she had held the seeds of it all along.
She was the ultimate predator - a pinnacle of evolution - perfectly designed to fight and kill. And although she barely knew the word, or the emotion that it described, she loved it.
The Sentinel was quick, and foreign to her training, and she had some trouble pinpointing the really vital spots on its body. She finally managed to scale its back and rip a sizable gap in the metal, raked her claws across internal machinery. Wires and fuel lines were severed, parts were damaged, and the Sentinel made a low chugging noise and attempted, belatedly, to swat her away. X23 jumped off, towards the soaring metal wall; she stabbed the claws on her left hand and foot into the wall and hung on, watching to see the damage cascade play itself out.
A flurry of sound and movement high overhead caught her attention, and, feeling relatively confident in her victory, she momentarily took her attention from the robot to see what was going on.
Three more Sentinels were engaging a lone figure in the middle of the main shaft; all four were airborne and the battle shifted back-and-forth across the open space. The mutant, surrounded by a bright yellow-white glow visible even to X23, was holding the robots at bay and somehow scoring a few hits at the same time.
Closer at hand, the Sentinel on the floor opened one arm and fired a blistering salvo of white-hot lasers, and X23 found herself too preoccupied with ducking to allow for any more staring. None of the lasers hit the generator, but some of them hit her, and even though they were quick injuries to heal, they hurt, and she howled involuntarily.
The Sentinel clomped closer and let loose a fresh barrage of lasers. X23 took another glancing hit, singing her hair, then pulled her claws out of the wall and leapt for the robot. The Sentinel, moving faster than she'd expected, blasted her to one side with a shot from its hand. It was more of a blow to her pride than anything else, and it made her precarious control over her anger slip another notch.
She turned mid-air and got her feet under her, slid to a crouching stop on the smooth metal surface of the hydraulic lift. The Sentinel followed up on its lucky shot with more unanticipated speed. It extended one hand and grabbed her. And squeezed.
Her claws could not shatter under any set of conditions. But her flesh could rupture, and caught between the fingers of a giant metal hand, it would. Before that, though, the EMP generator would give - and it did.
She felt a pop! and then dozens of razor-sharp lacerations on her back as the generator was crushed into shrapnel. It was the sting of a plan lost beyond all hope of recovery.
X23 let out a roar of raw, unfiltered rage and sprang all of her claws at once, twisting in the vise of the Sentinel's grip to do maximum damage. The adamantium blades cut through the tempered steel as though it were tissue paper. She applied pressure from her muscles and, with a final kick of one foot, pried the hand open enough to slip free.
She dropped to the lift and jumped off the side immediately, catching hold of the edge and swinging herself underneath. Three quick, broad slashes with her hand claws severed a part of the underside that was critical to the structure as a whole. The load-bearing support buckled and collapsed with an anguished squeal as she let go and fell to the bottom-level floor. She hit the floor with a smooth tuck-and-roll that took most of the impact, and came to her feet again just in time for the lift to collapse altogether.
The Sentinel, damaged, running slow, still preoccupied with targeting her, failed to initiate its flight engines in time. The lift toppled and the robot went with it, crashing down in an unholy cacophony of booming metal. Set off by a single stray spark, the Sentinel's fuel tanks ignited a heartbeat later, and the lower levels of the factory were rocked by the ensuing explosion. X23 did not witness the robot's demise, however, because she had taken cover at the first scent of flammable liquids. Now, from the relative shelter of a corridor, she sniffed at the heavy burning smell - there wasn't anything else like it - and bared her teeth in contempt for her adversary.
She heard another explosion high above, booming and echoing off the walls, and then great chunks of flaming metal began raining down, adding to the blistering inferno on the bottom level. Already the fire was beginning to lick across the floor towards her, making sweat bead up on her forehead and beneath the leather of her uniform. There was now no choice; she would have to retreat into the corridor and find another way up.
It occurred to her to wonder who had destroyed the other Sentinel - who had been able to hold three at bay simultaneously in mid-air. Not the guards. Who else was in the base? Rachel?
She bared her teeth again, hissing this time, and abruptly decided she didn't care. Turning on her heel, she sprinted into the darkness of the corridor, which at this point had lost all power, even to the emergency lights. When the in-house backup generators went, the entire base would be plunged into perfect black.
Of course, in order for the backup generators to go, it would mean the fire would have to have eaten that far into the infrastructure of the building. Even though the darkness could only help her - she didn't need eyes, she had four other hyperkeen senses - she wanted to be gone by then.
She rounded a corner and caught a whiff of gunpowder, a human scent, and dropped flat to the floor just as the first burst of gunfire pounded into the air where she had been standing. X23 waited until the guard stopped firing, then, still lying prone, made a muffled, pained noise as if she'd been hit.
"Don't move," the guard warned, approaching her with his weapon drawn and aimed. She whimpered again and twitched a little, and the fool believed it. He got close enough to prod her shoulder cautiously with the toe of his boot, and that was far too close.
What happened next came too fast for him to react; she flipped onto her back, popped her hand claws and slashed the weapon into five segments. The pieces had barely clattered to the metal floor before she'd dropped the guard with a few deft blows to the chest and head.
She stood over his living body for a moment, looking over her shoulder at the thick scent of smoke that was beginning to drift down the corridor - and the fire that was no doubt close behind. A troubling thought had seized her, coming out of nowhere; she couldn't remember ever having it before. She had been trying to let the man survive, but with the fire closing in, he would die anyway, especially knocked unconscious. Burning was painful. Should she kill him to save him?
It was too big a question and morality too new. She stood there a moment longer, then shuddered all over like a dog shaking off water, and went to see what he had been guarding so zealously that explosions and fire had not moved him from his post.
She found a pneumatic blast door, reinforced across its front by strips of heavy material, with a DNA scan mechanism on one side. The door was impressive enough to raise the possibility that her objective lay on the other side. Human scents were all over it, one stronger than all the rest.
X23 slashed through the DNA scanner and ripped out the wires she'd exposed. Then she set to work carving an entrance in the door - not difficult, given that adamantium could cut through vanadium steel like a hot knife through butter, and the stuff the door had been made from was nowhere near as tough as vanadium steel.
When she'd hacked out enough of a gap, she slipped through and found herself in an office. Larger than the corridor, spacious enough to accommodate a lot of unnecessary junk, it clearly belonged to someone important, probably the person whose scent had been strongest. She moved through the office warily, senses on high alert. Someone - no, two people, related - had been in this space recently. One had been full of anxiety. The other was angry but not overly worried. Things had been gathered hastily, thrown together. The departure had been equally swift.
On a desk she found papers addressed to and signed by Bolivar Trask. This was it, then. She wouldn't get better access to what she wanted. And yet she couldn't find anything. Frustration bubbled up her spine; the information had been practically plastered all over the minor HYDRA base where she'd first seen it - the last HYDRA base she'd leveled. But here, where it was supposed to be, she was finding nothing.
Her search had taken less than a minute. She moved to the computer and spent a few moments checking that, found it had been purged. Nothing of value to her, nothing pertaining to the Master Mold project, remained.
She would have to find another route. Training suggested a living source of information.
Growling softly, she returned to the hallway and found that the unconscious soldier had vanished, leaving most of his gear behind. That brought mixed feelings and she was too wired to begin to want to name them. His scent trail led away, towards an alcove she hadn't noticed before; an exit of some kind, obviously. The two scents from the office also led that way. She went to investigate and discovered an elevator, too small to be anything besides a private emergency route.
The elevator itself was gone but a ladder was bolted to one wall of the shaft, and leaning in she could perceive the guard clambering through an open door on a higher level. That explained the ditched gear - too heavy for a fast climb. He must have been playing dead as well, she realized, and felt a kind of grudging respect.
She came back to the middle of the corridor when the discarded comm gear crackled faintly to life. It had been damaged by her earlier blows and she had to crouch down to hear better. "- Trask on level fifteen, needs escort to Master Mold -"
Living source of information. Bolivar Trask met that requirement - for now.
X23 popped a claw through the comm gear to prevent anyone else from using it. The shower of sparks burned her face, but she ignored the dozens of small pains until she was certain that the equipment was destroyed. Then she turned and sprinted for the elevator, and beyond that, level fifteen.