Chapter 21

300 Powerstones for extra chapter

On their way out, weaving through the sterile, metallic corridors of the base, they passed a large chamber with a shattered observation window. Inside, strange, complex machinery surrounded a large, raised vat in the center of the room. A thick, silvery liquid bubbled within it, casting an oppressive heat that could be felt even in the hallway.

"What… is that place?" Ethan asked, his voice laced with a feigned, childlike curiosity.

Wolverine stopped, his whole body going rigid. His gaze was fixed on the room, but his eyes were seeing a ghost from a past he couldn't remember. "That's it," he growled, his voice a rough, gravelly thing full of a pain he couldn't name. "That's the tank. Where they did it to me." He gestured with his chin at the bubbling vat. "That silver stuff… that's liquid adamantium. Stryker told me once, it only stays liquid at insane temperatures. The second it cools…" He trailed off, flexing his metal-laced fists. "It's indestructible." He turned and shot a look of pure, undiluted hatred at Stryker, who was being held firmly by Colossus.

Stryker, despite the blood matting his uniform from where Logan's claws had pierced his hand, managed a cruel, clinical smirk. "You should be thanking me, Weapon X," he sneered. "Without my vision, you'd still be fighting with those pathetic bone spurs. I made you immortal. I made you a god."

"Then let me thank you properly!" Wolverine roared, the six adamantium blades erupting from his hands with a final, furious SNIKT. He lunged at Stryker, ready to tear him apart.

"Logan, stop!" Professor X commanded, his voice sharp and authoritative. "We need him alive. He is our only proof that this was all a conspiracy. He is the key to stopping a war before it begins."

While Wolverine and the Professor were locked in a tense standoff, Ethan's eyes darted around the lab. While they were busy with their drama and ethics, he was busy with something far more practical: looting. He spotted a discarded, hollow titanium tube from a piece of destroyed machinery. Perfect. He slipped into the room, grabbed a heavy, insulated ladle, and scooped a dollop of the shimmering, molten adamantium into the tube. He set it down in a snowdrift just outside the broken window. The liquid metal solidified almost instantly with a faint hiss. With a grunt of effort, he shattered the now-brittle titanium casing, revealing a perfectly formed, brutally heavy, and utterly unbreakable adamantium staff.

Saiyans like to fight with their fists, he thought, testing the perfect, dense weight of the weapon in his hands. But Future Trunks used a sword for a reason. When you're not a god yet, a good weapon helps. He'd have preferred a blade, but this would do. This would do very nicely.

"We have trouble!" Professor X's voice suddenly rang out, filled with a grave urgency Ethan had never heard from him before. He went rigid in his wheelchair, his eyes losing focus. "Outside!"

"Professor, what is it?" Storm asked, rushing to his side.

"It's Erik," Charles gasped, a line of sweat beading on his brow. "He's in a fight. And he's… he's losing."

A collective shock went through the group. Magneto? Losing? To whom? What force on this planet could possibly overwhelm the Master of Magnetism?

Ethan, his new adamantium staff clutched in his hand, felt his stomach drop. This wasn't in the script. This wasn't in any movie he'd ever seen.

He rushed outside with the others into the frigid pre-dawn air and stopped dead, his eyes widening. A chaotic battle was raging across the snow-covered clearing. And his mind, for the second time in as many days, reeled with a single, panicked thought: Oh, you idiot. You completely forgot about SHIELD.

A woman wreathed in a corona of golden fire was locked in an aerial duel with Magneto, her energy blasts slamming into his magnetic shields. A shield, emblazoned with the Union Jack, ricocheted off a tree and slammed into Mystique's back. A man with a bow was loosing arrow after arrow with impossible speed and precision. And standing behind them all, directing the battle with calm, terrifying authority, was a tall, bald black man in a leather trench coat, an eyepatch covering his left eye.

Ethan's brain went into overdrive, identifying the players with dawning horror. Captain Carter. Hawkeye. A shockingly young Black Widow, her movements a deadly dance as she engaged Mystique. And that meant the woman fighting Magneto had to be Maria Rambeau, this universe's Captain Marvel. Standing next to the man with the eyepatch was another man with a receding hairline and a blandly pleasant face—a young Phil Coulson. Nick Fury. This was the nascent form of the Avengers.

Of course. An attack on the President of the United States. Of course Fury's SHIELD would be the first on the scene. This wasn't some isolated mutant event in a self-contained story. This was the Marvel Universe. Everything was connected. Everything was a potential world-ending catastrophe. The movie plot is a cracked, useless compass, he thought, his mind racing. I'm flying completely blind.

The fight ended with brutal efficiency. Captain Marvel broke through Magneto's shield with a powerful photon blast, sending him spiraling towards the ground. As he fell, an arrow from Hawkeye's bow sprouted from his shoulder—a non-metallic, polymer shaft with a potent tranquilizer tip. Magneto hit the snow and didn't get up. At the same time, Captain Carter's shield returned to her hand just as she delivered a crushing blow to the back of Mystique's head. The shapeshifter crumpled.

The battle was over. Nick Fury stepped forward from behind his agents as the X-Men emerged from the spillway, his one good eye taking in the entire scene: the defeated mutants, the damaged base, Professor Xavier in his wheelchair, and Kurt Wagner, the presidential assailant, standing among them.

His voice cut through the cold morning air, carrying the absolute authority of a man who believed himself to be the only real power in the world.

"Professor Charles Xavier," he said, his tone flat and non-negotiable. "I am Director Nick Fury of SHIELD. On the authority of the World Security Council, you and your students are to surrender yourselves into my custody immediately for investigation regarding the attempted assassination of the President of the United States." He gestured with his thumb toward the unconscious forms of Magneto and Mystique. "Don't try to resist. You've already seen what happens to those who do."