Evolto City - Deployment Chamber Omega
The air was dense with tension. Zalthorion stood silently, eyes locked on the swirling portal stabilizing within the chamber. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. The agents assembled before him already knew the weight of the mission.
Across from him, Marisov stood with unnerving calm. Barefoot. Unarmed. A simple child's bag slung over his shoulder filled with drawings, two small plush dolls, and a glowing containment crystal.
His voice had swayed the Council not by power, but by understanding. By empathy. He was the only one Wanda might listen to.
Even Zalthorion, beneath his silence, knew it was the right call.
But he wouldn't send Marisov in alone.
Surrounding Marisov were some of Zalthorion's finest:
Lioren, the Null-Mage, wrapped in violet robes, immune to chaos corruption. A silent monk whose eyes shimmered with inverted stars.
T'Varic, an Exo-Guardian, a towering obsidian suit powered by twin Blackmore cores, a walking fortress designed to survive supernovas.
Myrrha, the Psy-Anchor, her thoughts woven in telepathic harmonics, ready to stabilize Wanda's mind if it began to unravel.
Dendrite-23, a sentient plant being carrying an entire healing ecosystem within itself, tasked with protecting Marisov biologically and emotionally.
Zalthorion finally stepped forward and knelt to Marisov.
"Only speak... if you feel her, not when you think it's time. Let her come to you. And if anything goes wrong"
"I know," Marisov interrupted gently, "they'll protect me."
Zalthorion nodded once, his hand resting over Marisov's heart.
"Remember, little light… some storms aren't meant to be stopped only understood."
Target Location: The Scarlet Womb
They emerged into a twisted realm, shaped by grief.
A cracked sky of hexagonal glass panels. Floating memories suspended midair visions of Tommy and Billy, their laughter, their screams. The landscape bled red and gray, stitched together by Wanda's chaos magic.
And at its center Wanda Maximoff.
She hovered, barefoot over a field of flickering illusions, tears trailing down her cheeks, red threads unspooling from her fingers like webbing holding the broken reality together.
She didn't look up.
She already knew.
"You brought... him," she whispered.
The agents stepped forward in a defensive arc, shielding Marisov.
But the boy, without command, walked around them.
"Hi," Marisov said softly.
"I lost them. Again," Wanda said, voice shaking. "And the voices... won't stop."
"I know," he said, holding out the dolls. "But they're not gone. You're just... trying to hold the story on your own."
The agents tensed as the ground cracked.
Chaos surged around Wanda like a storm.
But Marisov didn't flinch.
"You're not a monster. You're a mother. And mothers need help too, right?"
Her power surged red tendrils lashing out. Myrrha reinforced her psychic veil. T'Varic stepped forward. But Wanda held up a trembling hand...
"...Don't hurt him," she whispered.
And the storm slowed.
The cracked reality around Wanda pulsed violently, saturated with blood-red chaos energy that swirled like a storm made of memory and madness. In the shattered sky above, echoes of her lost children Tommy and Billy shimmered like ghosts, unreachable yet ever present.
Marisov stood before her small, unarmed, and unwavering. His eyes held something rare, something Wanda had not seen in what felt like lifetimes: pure, unfiltered kindness. A light untouched by despair or rage.
Wanda's voice was barely more than a whisper, brittle and broken by years of grief."I can't bring them back…" Her hands trembled. "But maybe… maybe I can still find a new family."
She looked at the boy, then at the agents flanking him silent, tense, protective, but unsure.
"Let them take it," she said, tears brimming. "The system… take it from me. I just want peace."
The team moved fast.
At the front, Dr. Wagner stepped forward, cradling a sleek, compact device a fusion of black hole compression and psychic dampeners, humming with barely contained force. He moved with the cold precision of a surgeon.
"Zis is ze best technology I hef developed in such a short time," he muttered under his breath, activating the device.
As the device engaged, Wanda's chaos magic surged in protest the very system screamed, resisting separation. Red lightning arced from her body, striking the edges of the containment field. But the dampeners held, piercing the system's anchor points with scalpel-like accuracy.
The extraction was violent. Reality rippled. The sky above flickered. The system tore free with a shriek not of metal or magic but of something alive, ancient, and unwilling to let go.
Marisov did not flinch. He simply watched, his presence like a quiet flame in a hurricane.
With one final, soul-piercing wail, the system was severed. It tore from Wanda's being in a storm of crimson and shadow, twisting in the air, desperate to find a new host
but the agents were ready. Psychic barriers flared to life, encasing the entity before it could lash out.
Wanda collapsed to her knees, gasping. Her body trembled, drained to the core, but her face her face was free.
And the system?
It floated in its prison of light, still shrieking, clawing at the invisible walls with tendrils of broken code and raw intent.
But it was over.
For the first time in years, Wanda was truly alone.And for the first time, she was not afraid.