Author's note: ALL ART COMMISSION OFFERS FOR THIS STORY WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY DECLINED
...
Kurt jumped onto the head of the robot as it moved, floating over the ground in its strange, standing-still posture, firing red beams of concussive energy, the same type that came out of Scott's eyes, into buildings, into people. He activated the circular module on the bottom of his right wrist, and a pink aura surrounded his right hand as a rapier-like blade shot out from the area covering the top of his fingers. He plunged the Psi-Blade into its neck, and screamed as the robot generated a powerful electrical field that flung him away, and caused him immense pain he had rarely ever felt in his life.
"KURT!" Mystique screamed, teleporting to him, grabbing the dazed teenager and teleporting them both away just as the Robot's stylized face swiveled towards them and fired its optic blasts. Power Princess tackled it into a nearby wall of rock, smacking it with her chain and making it wobble before it fired its optic blasts, which she absorbed with her golden wrist bracers, for a second before it sent a heavier blast towards her and blew her backwards into another building.
Mystique in the meantime had teleported her and Kurt across the street, where he coughed, shaking as he struggled to recover.
"Well, at least we learned something..." Kurt coughed. "Don't grab it..."
The Robot in the meantime was pelted with AR-10 rifle fire, some of which actually started to get through, but the Robot quickly zeroed in on the deformed Mutant shooters, sniping them all in turn, before a giant piece of falling rock debris was teleported above it and crashed into it.
Kurt, still struggling to stand, lurched forward, assisted by Mystique, her natural, bald, red skinned form having turned to Diamond as she went ahead of him.
"Is it dead?" Kurt asked.
"I don't think so..." Mystique answered grimly as she saw the heavy rock debris starting to absolutely crack in half.
"GET BEHIND ME!" Mystique yelled, crouching down and clutching Kurt to shield him from the rock debris that were flung everywhere as the Robot burst free with the aid of its optic blast weapons.
"High-Level Mutant Opposition Detected..." the now very slightly scuffed eight-foot-tall robot said in a heavily synthetic voice not unlike the kinds of programs available on certain personal computers. "Initiating Neutralization Procedure..."
Mystique's now-diamond eyes widened as its chest and arms split open, revealing multiple heavy cannons and rail guns and she shoved Kurt into an alleyway to save his life as the robot fired.
Energy projectiles and magnetically hyper-accelerated metal slugs slammed into her glistening diamond body, sending her flying before Kurt teleported her back to him, leaping and catching the heavily stunned Mystique, having reverted to her red skinned body.
"Don't get in front of it either, Kurt..." she warned weakly, tissue bubbling due to her cellular structure having been overtaxed to the limits of its ability to withstand direct damage.
"How do we stop it?" Kurt said, voice still weak as he recovered from the lighting blast.
"I'm afraid it's just one of those things where we have to keep pounding it until it dies..." Mystique replied.
Kurt peaked around a corner, tried to teleport it. No effect. He got behind cover, hearing gunfire ping off it.
"I can't teleport it..." Kurt breathed, everything still hurting. "I don't understand...that's never happened before..."
"Kurt, start teleporting anything heavy and loose right on top of it..." Mystique advised, finally getting the strength to stand. "I need time to...do something..."
"Like what?"
"If we can't damage it's outer layer, then we need to think of unconventional means of stopping it..." Mystique hissed, clearly still in a great deal of pain.
"What if I try teleporting a rock into one of its barrels?" Kurt suggested as he teleported a piece of destroyed building on it. It punched through it after a moment.
Mystique shook her head. "Too dangerous. That thing is using computer assisted targeting. You might damage it, but it would almost certainly turn you into paste in the process..."
"Well, there's got to be something we can do..." Kurt trailed as Power Princess savagely attacked it once more, her punches leaving very small dents as she repeatedly battered it in the face, ensnaring it with her chain and swinging the large robot into a wall, then flew and tackled it as it tried to exit the crater.
"Then again, Miss Zarda is doing remarkably well..." Kurt quipped darkly before he got an idea.
"I've got it!" Kurt shouted. "Blink!"
"Huh?"
"The girl who gave me this job at the postal service. She could open portals..." Kurt explained as he teleported an on-fire generator behind the robot that exploded violently, just as it tried to fire its chest and arm cannons at Power Princess, staggering it and allowing the Princess to slam her fist into its stylized, vaguely human-like face and actually managed to chip an extremely tiny part of its lower jaw off, and her punches were only getting stronger, trying to find the upper limit of what it's chassis could tolerate as she drew on the power of the Love Stone in her clay skull to fuel the ever increasing strength of already superhuman punches, but a powerful spray of energy cannon fire sent her hurling into the ceiling.
"We'll use her to cut it in half!" he suggested.
Mystique blinked. "That's...that's a really good idea, actually...I'll go look for her..."
"What were you going to do before that?" Kurt asked as he helped her walk.
"I might still end up using my first option, even if we win..." she corrected as she summoned the strength to jog. "Keep it distracted, but don't engage it directly. Stay out of its direct line of sight at all times!"
Kurt nodded but looked at the desperate people as Mystique ran off to the Parcel office.
"Easier said than done. Lord, watch over me..." he said as he ran to re-engage the robot...
The Robot was getting pelted with AR-10 fire from all sides by various mutants, most of whom had the sense to aim for the eyes. It was they, ironically who scored the first major damage against the robot, making one of its red eye emitters explode, but this seemed to make it go into overdrive, saturating the area the shooters had fired from with cannon and railgun fire, obliterating the small pockets of resistance that had scored direct damage, only for a green blur in feminine form to punch it in the chest so hard it actually made a significant crater in one side of its chest. As Power Princess managed to dig herself out of the crater she had been fired into. She saw a furious green skinned Jen Walters slamming the Robot into the rock face with her punches, even as the Robot itself was pelted continuously.
For the first time, it raised its arm to throw a punch and sent her flying across the entire street, violently impacting into the stone road where she did not move again as it advanced on the Gamma Mutate.
"Mutate Organism Identified. Commencing Sterilization..." The Robot trailed, apertures in both palms spiraling open like irises.
As powerful, car-sized blasts of energy poured out furiously, Jen was teleported out of the crater by Kurt, who cradled her bloody, bruised form, her leopard print mini-dress stained with green blood.
"Miss Walters! Miss Walters, wake up!" Kurt pleaded as he dragged the green skinned woman down an alley, hearing the low hum of the Robot as it floated in its standing-still position towards him...
Only Power Princess smashing into the blind spot of its destroyed eye at top speed from above prevented it from firing again, but this time it was actually punching back and deformed Power Princess's clay body severely with every blow it returned, until it outright liquified from the robot's next punch, sending Zarda's tiara, gauntlets, and stilettos flying along with the glowing pink Love Stone in every direction. It was sheer luck Kurt happened to catch the Love Stone and one of Zarda's golden stiletto heels made of shimmering Uru.
As The Robot refocused on him, he flung the High Heel like a shuriken and its pointed heel was buried directly into its remaining eye weapon. The other half of its face exploded, and it dropped to a knee for a moment, Kurt frantically pulling the wounded Walters away while he still could, teleporting a massive chunk of the fallen mountain above on top of it. The surviving defenders in other areas stopped shooting for a moment.
The giant piece of rock cracked open and the now on fire robot advanced, walking now instead of floating, and gunfire began to batter it once more.
That was when Piotr, the boy of solid steel, leaped onto it, driving a steel fist into its flaming head, its internal sensors now exposed.
"KURT! RUN! RUN!" Piotr yelled as it grabbed him and smashed the boy headfirst into the street, but Piotr was just flat out built different, and all this seemed to do was make him angry.
"You are tough, Big Boy!" Piotr yelled, outright smashing the hand gripping his leg with a rage filled blow.
"BUT YOU ARE NOT COLOSSUS-TOUGH!" Kid Colossus yelled as he caught its other punch, decking it to the ground and tackling it, absolutely flooring it every time it tried to get up as Kurt pulled Walters to safety. Kid Colossus continued punching the robot even as it genuinely sent him reeling with every return punch. The bout began in earnest...
Kurt in the meantime had frantically dragged Walters into what looked like a Mutant saloon, with a bunch of patrons dead from stray energy blasts and railgun rounds that had over penetrated other structures.
A LOT of green blood was coming out of her nose and ears.
"Green...door...what...what IS it..." Walters muttered.
"Green Door?" Kurt muttered in confusion before shaking her.
"Miss Walters, please stay conscious.
"The Green Door..." she whispered. "It calls me...knocking..."
"Miss Walters! Focus. Don't answer it. Only the Devil himself could be the one knocking..." Kurt asserted.
Walters tried to move but could barely fidget. He might well be looking at her in her last moments. He didn't know how to stop what was surely a bleeding brain.
Not knowing what else to do, Kurt knelt over her and began saying The Lord's Prayer, setting the stone aside.
It glowed brightly as he prayed, psionically influenced by his intensely religious nature and intense desire to save Jen's life without his realizing due to still being in a very close radius to him, and covered Walters in pink energy, reversing her severe wounds to his astonishment.
"By The Munich Circus..." Kurt exclaimed as The Love Stone healed Jen Walters, who coughed. She still looked very weak, and was clearly in no condition to fight, however.
Kurt picked up the Love Stone, fascinated by its swirling pink energy in its interior, how it reminded him of the Phoenix Stone at the center of Threshold.
"Is this what Zarda really is?" he asked himself out loud. "How odd...but then again, Nightcrawlers living in glass houses should not throw strange glowing rocks from space..." He put the Love Stone in his pocket for now.
"Miss Walters?" Kurt asked, shaking her gently. She groaned, having literally no energy to do more than breathe and groan.
"I'm sorry that I have to leave you here Walters, but District X needs me." Kurt said firmly, before running out.
...
Mystique staggered through the ruined streets, the thunderous impacts of Piotr and the Robot punching each other across the complex carrying even this far out.
When she saw the orange beams of energy being fired from a street on her left, she half dared to hope that somehow Cyclops and the others had arrived here, having gotten a distress call.
But when she saw the groups of men in black jumpsuits with full balaclavas, over which was a bulky, heavy looking monocle like visor similar to what she saw Cyclops using except the Monocle portion was in the direct center of the visor as opposed to set over one specific eye, or the other, she knew it was no such luck.
Mystique was forced behind cover as they immediately opened fire on her by pressing a switch set in the palm of the right glove with their right hand's middle fingers, orange globules of concussive energy ripping off chunks off building, gradually annihilating her cover. She couldn't retake her diamond form; her cells having been pushed to their limit resisting the deadly damage of the combined fire of rail gun and energy cannon. That Robot had been designed to overwhelm even the toughest, most durable mutant eventually. No corners had been cut.
The Optic-Blast using soldiers advanced, orange bolts escaping the circular red lens at the end of their monocle-weapon. Mystique phased through a wall to avoid the more intense fire grabbing an AR-10 from a fallen Mutant on the floor and spraying through the walls to try and hit soldiers on the other side, forcing them to duck and return fire with precision and coordination through the walls that forced Mystique to run even while returning fire behind her.
"Switch to Scatter Mode, all of you!" The Leader of the soldiers ordered as he adjusted the dial on the side of his slim combat monocle, which widened the iris-like aperture on the lens portion so that it went from a mid-sized dot of red to a full two-point-five-inch radius.
Mystique poked her head from behind an overturned dining table and nearly lost it as a cone like spray of orange energy shots annihilated the table.
Two Soldiers ripped into the building using their shotgun mode on their visors, Mystique firing back and managing to actually hit one in the chest, before being forced to drop the rifle and run from the storm of retaliatory spray shots, diving out of a window to avoid the inside being completely demolished. She compacted her form and slid into a drainage ditch as the visor-armed soldiers flanked the destroyed building to try and find her.
"Spread out! Search the area!" the Squad Leader ordered, as Mystique's mass of formless red tissue slid out of the ditch silently reforming her humanoid shape. She began teleporting to their front and sides, forming claws from her knuckles which she used to stab them through the visor, vanishing every time they tried to zero in on her. Her timing had to be perfect, because their method of firing didn't require an extra half second to aim a rifle, zero in and fire-it was essentially just stare and shoot for the soldiers, and more than once they almost managed to blast her to pieces even with her unpredictable teleporting attack pattern, but eventually, Mystique cut them all down, her organic claws slick with blood. She didn't want to kill any of them, but these foes were a whole different scale of threat from what she had faced with the ORCHIS soldiers in Berlin: They were soldiers with the abilities of Cyclops. Whoever had sent them had finally crossed a line where it was impossible for any Mutant being attacked to hold back without risking certain death. They had crossed it sending the robot, true, but these soldiers were driving it home that their enemy wasn't going to be reasonable when it came to them. It was war now, whoever had declared it. And this would tick the Mutants off so hard they would pull out all the stops to retaliate on the one who had done this.
Mystique knelt down and ripped off the masks off a bunch of slain Visor-Soldiers, and she grimaced at the single, burning orange eye where two would normally be...no one looked alike otherwise. These were simple genetic graft jobs. But effective for their purpose.
Fortunately, it didn't seem completely one sided, as Mystique continued on her route to Blink, she encountered corpses of other Visor-Armed soldiers, riddled with AR-10 rifle rounds. The resistance seemed exceptionally vicious.
"HEEEYYYYYY!" Mystique called out to deformed Mutant Defenders on a nearby roof, watching the eight-foot-tall robot in the distance duke it out savagely with Piotr, who seemed completely indestructible to its assault, the two combatants locked in a knock down drag out brawl punching each other across the complex, Piotr seemingly ignoring railgun rounds fired point blank at his face as he continued savagely beating it into the ground, even finally managing to do critical damage by managing to rip one of its arms off and start beating the robot with it, only to get blasted all the way into the ceiling by one of its energy cannons. It rose up, riddled with punch craters, rifle rounds that were starting to penetrate its armor due to the chassis having been weakened. But it was still going. It still wouldn't die.
Piotr dropped to the ground, completely unharmed, and charged at it again, the shockwaves released by their punches as they wailed on each other cracked building foundations and shattered glass as far out as half the complex.
The Mutants on the roof top, watching in horror as both combatants displayed their strength in their brawl, managed to hear Mystique yelling.
"Who is that? I don't recognize her..." one of the heavily deformed Mutants said in a deep panic.
"Never mind, she's not shooting at us..." the other said leaning up from cover.
"WHAT IS IT?!" he yelled back through the roar of Piotr's epic brawl with the robot.
"HOW MANY OF THESE VISOR-USERS HAVE YOU SPOTTED?!" Mystique called back.
"WE SPOTTED FIFTEEN TEAMS HEADED FOR THE POSTAL OFFICE!" he shouted back through the near deafening impacts of Mutant and Robot Fists slamming into each other's bodies. "SEVEN PER TEAM!"
"Crap, I might already be too late!" Mystique hissed, breaking into a run, snatching up another AR-10 and some clips from a downed Mutant and breaking into a superhuman sprint.
...
Kurt himself had started encountering the Visor-Wearing Soldiers. One, in fact, nearly took his head off as he exited the Mutant Saloon with an orange, focused bolt of concussive energy and he only survived due to his immense superhuman reflexes that made him pull his head away at the instant he heard the firing sound. The Visor Soldier increased the intensity, delivering a devastating continuous orange beam that Kurt barely managed to evade with his acrobatics, knowing with dead certainty that the only reason he was still alive was because the beam was dependant on the speed its source could move and turn its head and his desperation, he remembered the Vibranium Vulgate on his belt.
He grabbed it in mid flip, shifting his position so it's shiny, mirror-like cover was directly in the path of a beam.
It deflected the orange beam right back at the chest of its source, killing him instantly. Kurt stopped flipping, heart pounding in terror. What WAS that thing? He'd never seen ORCHIS deploy anything like this. The closest he'd fought anything similar was when he fled the carbonadium tentacles of Colonel Arkady Rassovich in Siberia. He'd teleported that monster a hundred miles away from him...and still barely managed to escape him. Piotr had sworn revenge on Rassovich, due to him being the chief director of The Red Room. Arkady had personally conducted terrible experiments on Rasputin's Physiology in The Red Room's Omega Section, reserved for turning Superhumans into obedient operatives.
Kurt, stunned, walked up to the corpse, the gunshots of past battles ringing in his ears. But never like this.
Kurt threw up immediately, suffering a panic attack. He had always been able to fight his way out of his battles before without taking a life. But not this time. This one had been too dangerous, and he was on too much adrenaline to focus his teleportation properly.
Now he really was a soldier for Mutantkind. The Threshold military uniform applied to him perfectly, strongly resembling the red and black ensemble of various other versions of him throughout the Multiverse.
He knelt down, removing the visor, recoiling at the sight of a single orange eye on a face.
"Mein Gott! A Zyklop!" Kurt exclaimed, crossing himself. "More Mutants! Are they with ORCHIS?"
Piotr impacted nearby and leapt up in an instant. Piotr, as far as he knew, was indestructible. And he couldn't turn back to human skin as a price. Kurt wondered if Piotr would die a gleaming man of steel.
"Damn this robot. I've never seen an automaton take such punishment!" Piotr snapped, sounding genuinely rattled. First it was Wolverine he could not put down, now it was this strange new Robot more heavily armed and armored than anything he had ever seen. He was starting to think he had simply gotten lucky, ripping one of its arms off. He didn't feel tired or exhausted, but so far, all he was doing was demolishing the place with their fight. "I'm hitting it as hard as I can, but it just won't go down! What is it made of?!"
"Nothing the military would be caught dead paying for in the open..." Kurt answered back cynically.
"We had better figure out something soon, Comrade. I...I'm running out of ideas..." Piotr said very quietly before leaping off to re-engage the Robot, having no time to ask about the strange one-eyed corpse Kurt was standing over.
Kurt went to try and re-support Piotr, even as he caught himself worrying about Mystique for reasons he didn't quite understand. He came under fire from more of the Cyclops-Soldiers engaged him with prejudice, and this time he actively deflected with both the Vibranium Vulgate as well as using his teleport ability to draw them closer against their will to drive a heavy kick or punch into their skull (Though Kurt began to notice that in order to use the Vulgate to properly deflect their beams, he had to have both hands on it) and dived and somersaulted over their beam fire. but when one of them switched to their visor's Scatter Mode, Kurt was back on the defensive, teleporting them behind their fellows as they fired at him, hitting their comrades, panic-teleporting heavy debris on some, teleporting them so that when they reappeared, they were aiming away from him as they fired, allowing him a free hit, until he had brought down all of them, this time having not held back the strength of his punches and kicks, gradually growing to understand it was winner take all in this situation. To hesitate, to hold back was to die.
He prayed for God's forgiveness for what he would have to do to survive.
...
"CYPHER! Come in! Pick up!" Blink shouted in panic over the radio in the Threshold dig site and Cypher, still monitoring the burning orange Phoenix Stone at the exact center of the stone circle. Bobby, clad in his heavy, thick ice armor, was positioning the ancient statue of the golden, nude Loki, preparing to take it into the circle itself.
"What is it?" Cypher called out.
"We're under attack. Some kind of robot! It's slaughtering us! And there are others! Soldiers wearing some kind of visor that fires energy beams! If they're hitting us, they could be on their way to you!"
Cypher's mouth dropped open. He recovered after a second.
"Get down here, Blink."
"I can't! I'm too busy evacuating as many as I can through my portals!" she exclaimed. "If I leave now everyone on my end is dead..."
The surfer-type blonde man in the tacky Hawaiian Tourist shirt and shorts ran up to Bobby.
"We got bad trouble, Bobby. District X is under attack."
Bobby lumbered his constantly cracking and creaking ice armor, his actual body completely encased in the heavy ice armor's upper torso, face and head concealed by a massive blank helm of constantly freezing ice.
"Attacked? How?"
"Robot! A mean one, by the sound of it! And there are soldiers wearing strange visors that double as energy weapons!"
"I'll handle it-" Bobby started to say but Cypher stopped him.
"You're needed here! If those soldiers or one of those robot's attack, you're the single most powerful Mutant in the area! You're the only one who could hope to defend the Phoenix Stone besides me!"
"Still think it was a smart idea to uncover this place, Doug?" Bobby asked in an acid manner.
"Lecture later, fight now," Cypher replied.
"Fine," Bobby grumbled. "But you're cleaning up the bodies..."
Cypher rolled his eyes before rushing to the intercom at the lead analysis terminal.
"Attention, Excavators," Cypher announced as he spoke into an antiquated microphone. "This is a Condition X situation. All workers, prepare to flee to the evacuation tunnel. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a Drill-"
There was a loud explosion in the distance.
"No...they're already here!" Cypher whispered as he heard screams and shooting from the distance deeper in the excavated ruins.
"Stay with the Phoenix Stone, Bobby!" Cypher ordered as he grabbed an AR-10 and went with the other deformed members of the security team, also similarly armed, all rushing to the source of the explosion, and ducking as orange optic blasts lanced out of the dust cloud created by the explosion.
Cypher and the other Mutant's zeroed in and fired, for the beams had that double edged sword of making the shooter's position traceable. True to what Blink had told Kurt earlier, In the hands of a Mutant with even low level superhuman strength, the rifle recoil was heavily absorbed, allowing them to keep the rifle on target almost as if the gun had been attached to an automated turret. The Visor-Wearing soldiers, in spite of their horrifying firepower, started to drop from extremely well-placed shots fired in controlled bursts by Cypher and the other Mutants...
Rail Gun Slugs shot out from the smoke, forcing Cypher to duck but hitting multiple others. Cypher heard the distinct sound of gas releasing as a hiss before each shot in the distance and ducked behind one of the corners, peeking out and spotting a large, burly man in form fitting gray armor with multiple pouches and pockets, wearing a harness that seemed to have seemingly random machinery affixed to it, long black hair tied by a red bandana and with cold brown eyes, grinning as he unloaded on the defenders with a hand held rail gun, a twist on the dial on the side causing the entire weapon barrel to somehow transform into a satellite dish type weapon.
The man fired it and Cypher could only run as a massive sonic wave shot out from the dish and demolished the building corner he had been hiding behind.
Cypher returned fire, the bullets hitting the now enlarged dish and damaging it, making the man snarl and adjust to dial on the side again, converting his weapon into a flamethrower like device.
A blazing wall of flames erupted from its nozzle and this time Cypher didn't even bother to try and return fire, only running for his life to escape the terrible flames and finally diving behind an ancient street barrier, the heat everywhere as he blind fired over cover at his attacker.
"Ain't no use, boy! You got no chance. Come out!"
"MAKE ME!" Cypher shouted. "I got a bunch of 7.62 caliber rounds that might disagree with you!"
He heard a sigh. "Why do the egghead types always seem to think they're Bruce Banner when danger strikes-?" he heard his attacker muttering to himself before he heard the distinct sound of the entire weapon the man was carrying re-arrange.
Cypher instinctively rolled out of cover firing his rifle, eyes widening as the weapon his opponent had been transfiguring, now some kind of high-tech crossbow, went wide as his opponent dived to avoid fire, the bolt it fired rocketing off into the distance where it exploded violently against a building on impact, and Cypher fired again at the man's chest as he began to rise, having judged by the unprompted body language of his attacker that he wouldn't be able to react to Cypher firing in time.
Cypher got up, keeping the rifle trained on his fallen opponent. He fired again and again when the language of his opponent's form told him he was somehow regenerating from his wounds and was playing dead. This time he aimed for vitals. He kept the gun trained on him until he was certain the body 'read' as deceased to Cypher's perceptions.
He knelt down, picked up the dead man's weapon, some kind of crossbow that incorporated railgun tech and explosive bolts. How could the man create so many weapons out of just one? Was that his mutation?
A shuffling sound behind him made Cypher turn around and his eyes widened as he saw the man he had just killed leveling one of his hand-held rail gun at him.
"Long time no see?" the man asked with a grin. "Name's Greycrow, son, and you ain't getting rid of me that easily."
Cypher's response, having already ready the body language of the previous version of this particular opponent which allowed him to precisely calculate the exact position of his foe's weapon and how it would be held when about to shoot, was to raise his own rifle faster than he knew Greycrow could react, and hip fire a 7.62 caliber round directly down Greycrow's barrel, which caused a massive backblast in the gun that flung the now-dead Greycrow away from Cypher, with Cypher completely unharmed.
"I beg to differ." Cypher replied dryly.
Another explosion a few meters ahead of the new Greycrow corpse, and more of the Visor wearing troops rode in on what looked to be a stolen Roxxon Corporation Mine Drill Vehicle. They immediately began firing and Cypher charged, already knowing how to evade their optic blasts within a few seconds of observing the individual movements of their body and began firing back...
...
Bobby, when Cypher left, had focused on moving the Nude Loki statue closer to the hovering Phoenix Stone. Just being near the small, burning orange cosmic marble made his frozen skin crawl underneath his ice armor. Alone, he would catch himself wondering. Was it natural? Artificial? What was it?
They should never have explored further. What was happening now was evidence of that. It was a pity the other scouts had found it and not him. The moment he saw that floating stone with its endless flames beneath its shiny exterior, he would have iced the whole place and run.
But no. The fools had studied it. Someone had to have ratted them out. There was a leak.
Robert Louis Drake, or 'Bobby' as he preferred, fully intended to find the little weasel that had squealed and freeze them solid. That is, if Charles Xavier didn't find the culprit first.
But who? Who would have blabbed, knowing the consequences? What had they been offered? No easy suspects came to mind.
Who would have blabbed, knowing someone like Bobby would be sent after them by the Morlocks in retaliation?
He moved closer to the stone. Everything about this place scared him. Even touching this strange, smiling statue of an Avengers Member that shouldn't be here scared him. He hated having been reassigned to District X. He was less irritated doing jobs for Masque, but when he started getting vicious enough to start freaking that crooked bastard out, he supposed he probably shouldn't have been surprised when Callisto told him he needed to take a break from his duties.
A long break.
Bobby, as he mentioned previously in the chapter before this, didn't like the fanciful codenames other Mutants increasingly kept assigning themselves as they left normal behind. Bobby wanted to stay grounded. Didn't want to start thinking he could create an ice slide and somehow sail through the air.
There was a second reason. One he hadn't told Kurt.
Keeping a normal human name really freaks other Mutants out. Especially when one does the sort of work Bobby did for the Morlocks.
Sure, he had gotten called Ice-Man, by others. A name he scoffed at for the most part, it bears mentioning. But there was one thing about it he didn't dispute:
What he didn't dispute was how that name had absolutely nothing to do with his powers.
There was a reason The Morlocks hadn't been letting Charles Xavier know about Mutants like him.
He heard workers nearby coming under fire, even as he edged the statue ever closer to the Phoenix Stone, not certain what would happen. Cypher told him all he had to do, based on the ancient records he had translated, was get the hand being held out by the statue directly underneath the stone itself, and the Stone would do the rest.
The screams and shooting in all directions grew louder, but he finally succeeded in inching the open palm directly beneath the statue.
The Phoenix Stone sank into the golden hands of the Statue, melting into it like butter. It creeped him out to watch.
"Hey, Mutie, quit fondling the Michealangelo Piece!"
Bobby turned around, scowled under his ice helm at a man in a long white three-piece suit with pale skin and overly long white hair with all white eyes stared at him with his hands folded.
"Riptide..." Bobby muttered. "Didn't I freeze you solid last year? I didn't think you could heal from that..."
"We've met?" Riptide asked in momentary confusion. "Ah, never mind. Getting to know you will be fun all over again!"
Riptide spun his body impossibly fast but Bobby simply froze his ice armor's feet to the ground and a spiral of blue energy escaped one of his construct's thick arms, and Bobby, only somewhat self-conscious, struggled not to grin as he heard Riptide's death scream as he was frozen solid mid-spin as the rotation effect he generated was killed in its tracks.
"I hope it was fun. All three seconds of it." Bobby replied quietly as he walked past Riptide's frozen solid corpse. Being cold for so long had not done Bobby's mind any favors in the last eight years. It was what had contributed to him taking the kind of work Masque offered. It was not the only reason he did that sort of work, but Bobby was not yet ready to acknowledge all the other reasons.
He didn't move too far from the Phoenix Stone's containment circle. He spotted the Visor wearers filtering in from various incursion points, using drill machines to get through the bed-rock.
He summoned a wall of ice as their orange blasts came, the ice constantly renewing itself as the orange blasts impacted on the wall, ice spikes growing out and psionically directed by Bobby towards the shooters, impaling and freezing them solid against the bedrock. He smiled as he felt heat signatures go cold.
A massive gust of wind and Bobby's eyebrows raised only slightly as two more Riptide copies spun in from above over the ice wall, landing, both wearing the same three-piece suit.
"Your boss has money to blow, dressing you like that...must get expensive..." Bobby sneered quietly as both Riptides smiled holding both their arms out in front of them and spun them in a circular manner in impossible speeds. In seconds Bobby was forced to huddle down against hurricane force winds that ripped apart the equipment around him and smashed into him repeatedly before a blue aura surrounded his body and ice spikes shot out of the ice wall behind the riptides, impaling both and freezing them solid at the same time in seconds...
A heavy explosion exploded part of the ice wall and a red bolt of energy slammed into Bobby sending him flying and shattering his armor.
A large, muscular man with very brown skin and a mop of flat hair in black armor with a wide face lumbered through, grinning as he formed another spear of energy as Bobby rose.
"I heard they had placed a heavy hitter near our prize..." the man with the energy lance said as he got a good look at Bobby.
"And not just any heavy hitter either...the freaking Ice-Man himself..."
Bobby was about two years older than Scott. He was lanky, rail thin with skin that looked extremely pale, to the point of being albino and highly sharp symmetrical features. The eyeballs were strange, mostly a slick red, save strange, pale white irises that resembled that of a classic snowflake image. He wore faded black jeans and a sleeveless gray-t-shirt that had repeating images of a snowman in a top hat smoking a pipe, grinning as it held a serrated combat knife. He had an odd sort of handsomeness, but it was subverted by the slowly spreading grin that carried very, very faint hints of utter malice across Bobby's face, and the repeating pattern of very tiny X's in uneven lines going down from the immediate space underneath his eyeballs, running all the way to the chin. The X's on his face gave the extremely unsettling optical illusion that he was wearing mascara, and that it was running down his face in lines like he was crying. His hair was a faded grey despite his young age, short but somewhat spiky in some areas due to parts of his hair freezing together.
"So, it IS true..." His attacker noted as he stared at Bobby with his creepy smile that refused to leave Bobby's face. "Not a single 'H' on your face. All X's..."
"I put in the work as an X-Factor." Bobby replied casually, wondering why he was almost giddy at the prospect of watching another heat signature go cold. "No different then when a fighter pilot decorates his plane after a successful sortie."
This got a laugh out of the man.
"Pilots are defending their country. That's not why you mark your face, kid. If you're a patriot, then I'm a librarian. Those X's on your face are your scalps..."
This got a chuckle out of Bobby in turn.
"Well..." Bobby trailed with a very dark grin. "We all need our reasons to get out of bed in the morning...heh heh heh.."
The large man spun his lance of energy.
"Eh, so you're a slightly more prolific than usual Morlock Assassin who just happens to like killin' Muties. Nothing a Marauder can't solve..."
"Marauder?" Bobby asked, the creeping, extremely subtle malice in his smile that constantly threatened to bubble to the surface and render the expression totally inhuman widening it ever so slightly. "Is that what you call yourselves?"
"It's what our boss calls us, X-Factor..." The large man said before hurling his spear of energy at Bobby.
Bobby summoned a thick shield of ice and constantly renewed it as the man through energy lance after energy lance at Bobby, who advanced with a grin as the spear thrower grew more and more desperate as Bobby kept renewing his ice shield against the heavy explosions that threatened to break it apart, his attacker looking more and more worried until he outright finally attempted a full retreat as Bobby got too close, only to be blocked by a newly formed ice wall as ice-spikes started to grow out of Bobby's shield.
Terror started to creep into the man's face. It was moments like this that Bobby could barely start to remember what feeling warm was like.
"Got a name?" he asked, his tone saying the man would die anyway.
"My name's Harpoon, you snowball-lookin' bastard, and you definitely ain't seen the last-"
The now spiked ice shield was psionically shifted toward Harpoon at mach speed. You don't want the description of Harpoon's body after that.
"You mean I get to kill more of you?" Bobby asked sarcastically, forming a working guillotine of solid ice. "Well bring it on, I say! I ain't practiced my Robespierre Impression in a while!"
One of Blink's portals opened and he saw the 'Priest' of District X, Stick, leap out, the blind man in old, torn army fatigues leap through it, armed with his solid red cane, the portal staying open. He saw a strained Blink, ducking as the post office she was in came under fire from orange energy blasts before the portal closed shut.
"Bobby! We are under heavy attack! We need you over there. That robot is demolishing us!"
Stick then staggered back, his blind eyes turning to the statue.
"Something strange here...something in the air..." He said of the statue just as a Visor Soldier blasted through Bobby's first ice wall, making Stick react and throw his cane with superhuman force at the Visor-Wearer, sending him flying and impaling him against the wall. More Visor-Soldiers poured in but Stick was already moving at top speed, expertly somersaulting over or dodging their blasts with unnatural reflexes, multiple throwing knives and shuriken produced from his pockets which he hurled with the same deadly force as he had his cane, wading into a thick group of the Visor Soldiers, his punches and kicks and neck snaps devastating as he fought his way back to his cane, yanking it from the corpse.
Bobby raised an eyebrow. He knew Murdoch's story. The shrapnel that had blinded him in Vietnam had turned on other switches in his brain by complete accident. It was a one in a trillion kind of injury, whose particular effects were not going to be medically replicated anytime soon, possibly for decades. To see it in effect was unsettling. To be superhuman without being Mutant or Mutate. Just because of a war injury.
Bobby would have traded places with him in an instant. He didn't care if he never saw anything again. Just as long as he could be warm. Truly warm. Of course, it wouldn't solve everything else wrong with him.
"I can't help over where Blink is. Cypher gave me strict orders..." Bobby replied. "You should be getting out of here, Stick...more will come. I can't afford to keep my eye on you."
"I can take care of myself, thank you very much, Bobby..." Stick replied, disturbed at how slow and steady Bobby's heartbeat was. Stick had never liked Bobby's voice. Bobby was the only Mutant in this place who wouldn't really approach Stick of his own free will, and when he had, it was always in that thick, giant ice armor that obscured his vitals. This was actually the first time Stick had ever heard Bobby's voice and heartbeat without the Ice Armor.
It had discomforted him before. It terrified him now. There was something deeply wrong with Bobby. Something even Bobby himself wasn't quite aware of except maybe in fleeting moments of self-reflection, which were no doubt rare for him. It was why they had assigned him to this godforsaken place.
Stick had once entertained the idea of striking up a conversation with the iciest loner in all of District X, in an attempt to reach out. Thirty seconds of actually listening to his unobscured vitals told him it would be a fool's errand. Possibly a dangerous one too. Stick had learned years ago that people like Bobby aren't reached, they are prayed for.
Sometimes a miracle happens, inspires what mere words cannot, and they do change.
But it was not wise to hold one's breath.
"Fine, then. Make yourself useful. We've got incoming!" Bobby growled even as part of him was eager for another fight.
More Clones of Harpoon, Riptide, and now Greycrow breached the outer ice wall.
"Gentlemen! You're just in time for Thermidor!" Bobby said with a grin, gesturing to his guillotine of ice.
"They said you were a joker, Bobby. Let's see how much you can laugh after we cut out your tongue..." the Greycrow clone sneered...and was immediately impaled against an ice wall by Stick's cane, who reached into his pocket and hurled a smoke bomb in the direction of the others as he charged with superhuman speed at them. Bobby formed Ice Daggers and hurled them at the Riptide clones to keep them occupied, while Stick bore down on Harpoon with a vengeance, killing him in seconds with a number of well-placed punches and kicks to the throat, before flanking one of the Riptide clones being flanked by Bobby and delivering a brutal knee to the spine just as eight ice daggers got embedded in the clone's chest after the first had fallen from an axe of ice getting embedded into him.
More Visor soldiers poured in, but Stick had already found the Greycrow Clone's fallen railgun and started emptying it in their direction while Bobby conjured and hurled clouds of Ice Daggers from all directions to crush his opposition.
A green blast of energy that shook the entire complex threw Stick and Bobby to the ground.
"Stick, RUN!" Bobby commanded. He'd humored the old man enough. But at this point, only the big dogs could stay in the game.
Stick this time, didn't dispute Bobby, and ran for his life while the others were still fleeing from the Visor Soldiers through the largest hole in the ice wall Bobby had originally made.
Bobby turned to face what had made the blast.
"Robert. Louis. Drake." came a cold, feminine contralto with an English accent from the cloud of ice particles made by the new hole in his barrier. He saw a pair of glowing red eyes and an equally glowing red diamond in the area just above them
"How do you know that name?" Bobby asked quietly.
"I know much more than your name, Robert," she said in the cloud of ice particles. "I've been paying attention to your bloodline for a very long time."
Bobby felt himself paralyzed, unable to move.
"Your Mutation has affected you in a most fascinating manner..." the woman said as he was lifted up. He tried to use his powers and found to his surprise and horror that his access was somehow jammed.
"What ARE you?!" Bobby yelled.
"An enthusiast of the cause of advancing science...and a mutant tomorrow..."
Bobby yelled as he was slammed into the ground and dragged across it...
...
Mystique finally reached the postal office, found it under assault from the Visor Soldiers and immediately started teleport-spamming her attacks to get around their defenses, slashing and shooting her way to the office, which was now heavily damaged, sandbags piled up as deformed mutant defenders finished off whatever she hadn't yet gotten to, the rifle she had taken completely empty.
"Let me in!" Mystique called out as she watched in horror as Piotr was sent flying back into the ceiling from an energy blast, the now extremely damaged robot flying up and tackling him again. But Piotr was still furiously punching the flaming robot even as he was in its grip, screaming curses and insults at it in Russian, many of which involved the denigration of the Robot's hypothetical mother. The defending Mutants waved her over.
She rushed in, found an exhausted Blink, slumped in a corner, with a bad wound in her side from an optic blast, green blood everywhere. She was being treated by a human volunteer, desperately working on her with surgical tools. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, with streaks of silver on the sides of well-trimmed brown hair and on the sides of an equally well trimmed goatee with fair skin and green eyes.
"How bad is it?" Mystique asked the medic.
"It punched clean through to the other side," the Medic answered stoically, laser focused on treating her. "She has severe internal bleeding. Major Organ damage from severe kinetic penetration from some kind of energy weapon that looks like a visor. It's almost like getting suddenly impaled by a steel spike at high speed and then yanked out through the other end. I'm doing all I can, but it's not enough..."
Blink began coughing green blood to Mystique's horror.
The Medic looked up at her. "She's got eight minutes. Ten if she's lucky."
Mystique knew there was only one thing left to do. She knelt down.
"Miss?" Mystique called out softly. "Fraulein? I need your help..."
"You need my help? I'm done, lady! I'm about to walk through one final portal..." Blink said miserably, choking her words out through fits of coughing green blood.
"You may be the only way to defeat that horror..." Mystique said, wincing as the sound of Piotr and the robot's punches grew louder and louder.
"Your portals. We can use them to cut it in half!" The bald, red skinned Mutant elaborated.
"Do I look like I'm in any condition to make one?" she asked sarcastically.
"Then I need permission to assimilate some of your genetic material, so that I can duplicate your ability..." Mystique explained.
Blink, bleeding out, almost delirious from pain, knew even now that the time for arguing was at an end.
"Fine. Take whatever you need. Just kill that damn thing..." Blink hissed, choking out more green blood. She looked at the Medic.
"Give her the coordinates, Stephen..." Blink ordered. "She'll need them..."
The Medic nodded.
Mystique knelt down and touched the green blood in Blink's wound, absorbing the genetic material through her skin.
Mystique rose, the skin of her barbie-doll anatomy stretching and bubbling horrifically, making all the mutants and Stephen the medic backing off in terror as her body upgraded itself, becoming much more voluptuous in shape as a shock of dark blue hair that was slicked back sprouted on her bald scalp, her age decreasing in a physical sense from looking like she was elderly to a woman in her mid-twenties, her facial structure taking on some of Blink's smoother, more heart-shaped features, though she would still be recognizable to Kurt.
Blink slumped over, dead. The doctor's assessment had been optimistic.
Stephen, shaking in terror as he stared at Mystique, went over to a leather-bound codebook on a nearby desk and handed it to her, shaking.
Mystique took it, flipping through it. "What's Threshold?" she asked immediately, her voice sounding much younger, though her east German accent was still extremely noticeable.
"You'll have time to worry about that if we live. Go kill that robot..." Stephen said, close to freaking out from being near her.
Mystique nodded, teleporting out.
...
Kurt, after defending himself from the Visor-Soldiers, had arrived just in time to see Piotr and the Robot at a standstill. The Robot had neither the weapons nor the strength necessary to kill or even slightly wound Piotr, but neither did Piotr seem to have the strength needed to truly put it down once and for all, and the fight was just wrecking the place the longer it had gone on. Every surviving Mutant and Human Volunteer that wasn't shooting at the Visor-Wearing soldiers was shooting at the robot, and Kurt teleported a massive chunk of debris in front of its path as it flew, causing it to crash through it and veer off course from a surprised Piotr, who nonetheless capitalized on the Robot's misfortune, grabbing it by the legs and slamming it brutally into the ground with all his might, then Kurt teleported the giant statue of Jesus from the stone cathedral where Stick had given him the Adamantium Cross and Vibranium Vulgate out of pure desperation to finally stop the thing even if it meant losing District X, pinning the deadly robot to the ground with its sheer weight as the base of the statue landed directly on the robot's burning frame.
"Well done, you two..." said a familiar but much younger sounding voice said behind him.
Kurt wheeled around, mouth dropping in surprise as he beheld a much younger looking Mystique who strangely reminded him of Blink for some reason, still in her nude, red skinned barbie-doll anatomy form, and now with short, slicked back dark blue hair whose color disturbingly matched his own.
"HOLD FIRE! HOLD FIRE, COMRADES!" Piotr yelled, waving at the Mutant shooters in the distance. The gunfire stopped momentarily.
"Another evolution, Fraulein?" Kurt questioned hesitantly.
Mystique nodded sadly. "And at a very grave cost..."
She quickly hurried over to the robot, who even now was starting to summon the strength to break free.
"Piotr, grab a large chunk of wall or something!" Mystique instructed. "But it must have a flat surface!"
"Got you covered!" Piotr said, grabbing a broken chunk of wall. Mystique formed two portals, one in the middle of the air next to her, and one on the flat surface of the wall chunk Piotr grabbed.
"Put its head through the portal!" Mystique told Piotr, who fitted the Portal-bearing Debris over the robot's head.
The Robot's burning, moving head stuck out of the portal next to her and that is when she closed both, severing the burning head from a robot frame that finally went limp. Piotr now tossed aside the now useless debris.
"Are you boys alright? I'm so sorry I left you to face that thing alone..." Mystique said as he hesitantly approached. "I hope you can both forgive me, but I had to find Blink..."
"We all had our part to do. It seems, in light of being able to bring Blink...you've somehow become her..." Kurt noted.
"She was dying when I found her. I had no choice but to absorb some of her genetic material," Mystique explained, trying not to wince as she spotted Piotr's horrified expression behind Kurt's merely bewildered one.
"It is the hand of Providence," Kurt replied softly. "Many more would have died if we had not been willing to do everything in our power to stop this thing..."
Kurt clasped her shoulder.
"The Lord has allowed us to save many lives today..." he said to her. "We must take comfort in that and hope he has called all those taken this day into his arms."
"What is this thing, though? I've never fought anything like it. ORCHIS would never dare deploy something like this, it's too crazy even for them. This is the work of someone else..." Piotr concluded, choosing to focus on their immediate problem rather than how frightened he was of Mystique. It said a lot that even one who seemed completely indestructible was terrified of Mystique.
Just then, one of Kurt's pockets glowed with pink energy and the Love Stone shot out of it, hovering in the air as the scattered Asgardian Clay and the Uru accessories assembled themselves back into the Body of Power Princess, who floated to the ground in a pink aura, opening her eyes.
"How long was I out?" Zarda asked. "The Robot really knocked me for a loop...I'm so sorry I wasn't able to help more..." she said sadly as she saw the devastation.
"It is enough that you are here now, to help those who live still," Kurt said reassuringly. "Let us help clear District X of any remaining threats and tend to our wounded...oh no! I forgot!"
"Forgot what?" Mystique asked.
"Threshold! We must go to Threshold immediately! If they hit this place, they're no doubt hitting Threshold...Mein Gott..." Kurt whispered frantically.
"Follow me!" Mystique yelled, keeping ahead of the others to tank threats as she took her diamond form.
Just then Power Princess perked up.
"Everyone! I can feel Charles approaching with the others Fred and Toad are amongst them!" Power Princess exclaimed.
Mystique spun. "What?! Fred and Toad are safe?! Is Cyclops and Ororo with them?"
Power Princess nodded. "They'll be here in minutes! I gotta go to the Hangar...it got trashed; they won't be able to land!" Zarda exclaimed, taking off...
"Cyclops and Ororo?" Kurt questioned Mystique.
"Friends. Powerful ones," Mystique answered. "I just hope their presence can tip the scales..."
...
Scott, Ororo, and Fred had caught Toad and Danger up with everything that had happened to them after they had gotten separated. Toad for his part, left out the part of traveling to an alternate reality, and Scott noticed that Fred and Toad didn't seem to question each other too much. Blob for his part, was the quietest out of all of them, only observing how things progressed with a patience that Scott had never seen Fred exhibit before.
"You're Cyclops, right?" Danger asked. "Elektra. Modified LMD. Call me Danger when we are on duty."
"Programming?" Scott asked.
"My programming is to follow yours, Charles, Mystique's or Ororo's orders to help facilitate the safeguarding of the Mutant Species," Danger replied. "If necessary, I am to cease my own functions if it means the preservation of yours."
"You've been busy, Mortimer..." Ororo noted, suspicious of the LMD.
"Hey, Cyclops, is that a cybernetically enhanced Brain in a Jar?" Xavier called out from the cockpit.
"Yeah. It projects an image of a red skinned woman who looks like Essex." Scott explained, disturbed at how Xavier had just been able to identify such a thing at a glance. "We were forced to damage it after it tried to kill us."
"It's still alive. But I think I managed to give it a Buckshot Lobotomy..." Storm mentioned, glowing red eyes scowling at their prize from Carter Slade's final resting place.
"May I?" Danger asked.
Ororo slid the Brain Case over.
"This is relatively simple early nineteenth century psionics technology..." Danger remarked. "None of the more elaborate electronic safeguards against tampering. A lab piece, meant for research. I would be more than happy to reconfigure its functions to something more usable for our purposes..."
"Go ahead..." Scott replied, now processing the crazy around him at a steady rate.
Danger nodded and one of her fingers split open as thin wires snaked out and injected nanites into the leaking casing directly into the still living but lobotomized Brain within.
"By the way, are any of you partial to parodies of new-age self-help gurus?" Danger asked.
"Is this question related to what you are currently doing to that Brain?" Scott asked dryly.
Danger shrugged. "Maaaaayyyyybe..." she answered, drawing the word out in a semi-playful manner.
"Let's ask the Professor..." Storm suggested helpfully. "Hey, Professor, are you partial to parodies of self-help gurus?"
"Look, Ororo, if we're all gonna invest in this and get hip deep into some hardcore traumatic stress we should at least have something to point and laugh at along the way..." Xavier replied irritably, stressed out over what he would find at District X. "Just use your best judgment, Danger."
"Understood. Results may take a while to manifest..." Danger replied.
Danger withdrew her nano-machine injectors after a minute. A few minutes later, the mountain that hid District X came into sight...
"No..." Xavier exclaimed in horror as the Jet approached the mountain where District X had been concealed in. He saw columns of smoke and deep cracks in the rock face as he approached the hidden hangar, which parted its rock facade to the sides as more columns of smoke poured out, but where quickly stifled somehow.
As he desperately lowered the jet as safely as he could, he spotted Power Princess, hovering with a pink aura as she telekinetically cleared the wreckage.
Xavier landed the jet and quickly signaled everyone to head out. Danger, the heavily modified LMD from a remnant of the original version of this reality immediately switched her leather clad look to a far more scantily clad, dark blue t-shaped wear with matching long boots and gloves that revealed as much skin as it could possibly get away without crossing into being obscene, which was a similar design scheme to that of Power Princess herself. This fact immediately caused Danger to smile as she saw Power Princess for the first time.
"See, Professor? She gets it." Danger said enthusiastically as she stepped off the craft. "Super-Hero Logic, folks! We either live the profession, or we sink like stones into obscurity."
"Someone new to our group, Professor?" Power Princess questioned as she landed before giving Danger a thumbs up for her similarly revealing costume.
"This is Danger, a horrible technological threat borne of possibly mad science," Charles muttered sarcastically.
"Guilty!" Danger confirmed.
"What happened here, Zarda?" Scott questioned, expression stoic and unfeeling as he hefted the backup Captain America Shield, the strange Lever-Action shotgun that never ran out of ammo in his other hand. A wounded Ororo was quietly at his side, her wounds treated on the flight here. Everyone on the Jet, with the sole exception of Danger, was emotionally and physically exhausted. They were not ready for what came next. But then again, no nascent Super-Hero team is ever ready when they have barely been active two days and they're going to meet one of their worst enemies for the first time.
"A Robot attacked. A powerful one...and soldiers. Soldiers with your powers, Cyclops..."
"WHAT?" Scott, Blob, and Storm said in unison...
Toad, in the meanwhile, had perked up at the mention of a robot.
"Robot?" Toad questioned. "What kind of Robot."
Power Princess hissed something in a strange Alien language and a shimmering, golden image of the Robot in question appeared for all of them to observe.
Everyone stepped forward and got a look, Toad and Danger's mood had shifted considerably as they got a good look.
"Danger...am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?" Toad asked. "Is that-?"
"It is," Danger confirmed. "A very primitive model. But it's definitely a Sentinel..."
Xavier turned to Danger. "Sentinel? What's a Sentinel?" he asked her.
"A specialized, often megalithic Android designed to track, detain, or exterminate Mutants," Danger answered.
"My God..." Xavier whispered, too stunned at the moment to question how Danger could possibly know this.
Then, everyone saw Charles Xavier get genuinely furious for the first time.
"Those madmen! Those selfish madmen! They'd actually do it! They'd actually start a Genocide in this day and age! Have they learned absolutely nothing from Vietnam?! Korea?! Auschwitz?!" Xavier raged, red in the face as he hefted his weapons, an M-79 Grenade Launcher and a fully loaded pump action shotgun.
"Well so help me, they'll learn the damned lesson even if I have to kick it past their teeth and down their rotten, murdering throats!" he snarled before heading to the Hangar Exit.
"Game faces, everyone! Tonight, we tap into our inner Nick Fury!" Xavier snapped as he went ahead, his righteous indignation somehow snapping everybody except for Scott into a determined psychological lockstep.
So, THIS is the man who survived an amusement park themed assassin. Scott thought to himself in silent approval, starting to re-evaluate Charles Xavier as he followed him...