Over the Pacific, Ororo flew among rain and clouds. She was being followed.
Behind, above, and below her, the Sentinels chugged along. They were old surplus, years old, found and reactivated by some sapien-dominionist cult, dispatched to cull whatever mutants they could find off the Washington coast. Like the all those old models, they were big, slow, and, by current standards, deeply, deeply outdated.
This whole chase was tedious.
She could end it whenever she wanted. The forty-foot tall, barely-operational antiques weren't anything but target practice for her, but she needed to get them far enough out to sea so that whatever bits she would eventually blow them into would either sink into the trenches or be lost for at least a few years to the byzantine currents of the Pacific ocean. Better there than over the countryside to be found and reconfigured into some homebrewed mutant killing machine. These were flying hunks of trash that could do little to harm her, but that didn't mean they couldn't easily kill other mutants.
The old Sentinel OS, though comparatively primitive now, was still discerning enough to scale potential threats. Even the most basal Sentinels would be able to recognize her as extremely dangerous, switching to a strategy of pursuit while they reached for backup via now long-closed channels. They'd retry in bursts every few seconds until she tired or they were destroyed. Ororo, though, rarely tired.
She churned the air around her to produce a quick jolt of speed while she pulled up the GPS on her wrist, displayed simply over a private, Forge-engineered frequency. Seventy eight miles from the mainland. Good enough.
She dipped, channeling swells of air behind her. She could sense their individual electromagnetic fields, each one blending into the other. With a gesture she created a flurry of soft-ball sized hailstones from the moisture in the air, directing them as a shotgun blast through the midsection of the one at the center of the formation. There was a cacophony of small explosions as they tore through the internal machinery and immediately caused its propulsion mechanisms to fail. The whole of it began to fall towards the ocean half a mile below.
The two Sentinels that had flanked it changed formation and returned fire. Ororo shot up in a twisting, zig-zag formation to dodge while wrapping herself in a continuous, rolling sphere of air that made the rounds bounce off like they were made of rubber. She held a hand to her side, mentally guiding lines of voltage along the clouds. There was a brief pause as the robots attempted to reorient their course, but before they could a lightning bolt tore through them in blinding sequence, exploding through their midsections. They sputtered into a cascade of metal viscera.
The first one hit the ocean with a large crack, shattering like glass. The other two, rent into thousands of pieces, rained down in a shower of hot metal and half-melted plastic. She hovered there in a repeating cycle of air currents and watched it for a moment.
The flight back towards land was quiet. She descended a few hundred feet, coasting just below the clouds at a leisurely, subsonic pace. She kept the influence of her powers limited to her own propulsion, letting the systems ease out back into the broader global exchange of energy.
She made landfall on the northern Oregon coast, near Cannon Beach. She absorbed the relative quiet for a moment before reaching out to Nova.
You there?
Storm, yes. Cassandra replied in her head. What's the situation?
Resolved. I'm back on land. What about Jean's excursion? Anything worth mentioning?
Cassandra paused. About that. I'd prefer to discuss those matters in person. All hands. We have some decisions to make. When can you be here?
As soon as you need to be. An hour, faster if you let the Cuckoos give me some cover.
Done. Thank you, Ororo.
She let the older woman's voice fade from her head and ascended once more into the atmosphere.