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So saying, he knelt down next to the two unconscious members, hissing as he saw the wound across Magma's head where she had smashed into a table as she fell and the vacant face Nightcrawler was showing. An instant later Magma's wound was healed, and both of the wounded warriors disappeared to join their fellows up on the roofs. "Right now it's just us, but the defenders seem to have mostly shot their bolt, at least in the exterior of the building. I think we need to move quickly to take advantage of that before they can try to pin us down again."
Psylocke nodded and fell into step with Harry. The two of them moved down, through the building, slightly more cautiously now, but still forging ahead quickly.
They ran into a few more defenders: Blockbuster and Harpoon at one point, Arclight and Scalphunter at another. But neither team could handle Harry's magic, and whenever they felt the impact of a new wave of telepathic power, Psylocke would be able to beat it off her, while Harry, his mind hidden under his cloak, barely felt it. He also still couldn't feel the telepathic link between himself and Jean, though, and that was beginning to piss him off as the minutes rolled by. He hadn't realized how dependent he himself had become to that link, and, with it gone, it was as if a part of Harry was missing.
They also began to run into what Harry had feared they might: pockets of former government employees turned into prisoners in their own offices and used as hostages. Twice Riptide and Harpoon were using them as human shields, which made them hard to deal with. And teleporting the prisoners outside to the street or up to the roof also slowed them down.
Outside, the flyers were still running into difficulty. A new enemy had appeared there at the same time that the telepath had launched her attack. This mutant looked like a massive flying ball of thermal and pyrokinetic energy, black and dark umber fire bursting out of a seeming suit of dark black armor complete with helmet. He announced himself with a blast of energy that nearly took Rogue out of the sky right off the bat, slamming her in the back and searing through her yellow armor with enough heat to cause her pain even if the blast was dissipated by her armor. "I am Reignfire, and I will end all of you! All of you will die for my master!"
He and Sunfire clashed then, the samurai roaring in behind a series of flame blasts. The beast didn't seem deterred by them at all and smashed bodily into the Japanese mutant, roaring out, "You! You were one of the first models, the secondary progenitor! Yet you fight against the master? Traitor, you are a quisling to your own species!"
"What? I assure you, creature, I have certainly not begotten any children, and most decidedly not one such as you!" the Japanese samurai shouted back, blasting the man with a salvo of pyrokinetic fire in the face, which only seemed to make Reignfire stronger.
"You do not see! It was your genes, yours and the one called Roberto Dacosta which created me. I am the two of you combined, perfected! Upon my master's command I will burn away the dead branch that is Homo Sapiens, searing the world so that only the those of the next evolution can survive under his command."
"Blimey," Banshee muttered as he flew behind the thing, hitting him with a supersonic scream and causing Reignfire to break off of his assault on Sunfire and turn to them. "This Sinister fellow's really got this whole brainwashing thing down to an art, doesn't he?"
Rogue announced herself again by blasting her way up from where she had crashed into the ground down below, thrusting her fists forward to slam a double-fisted blow into Reignfire's stomach, ignoring the heat and the wave of fire that wafted over her during the impact, only turning aside when she slammed him into a building, giving the pyro mutant a few cracked ribs for his troubles. He groaned aloud in pain but came back strong, smashing her away and then pushing out of the building she had embedded him into, some of the concrete and metal around him melting as he did.
From the side of the government building came more fire from within, and Rogue grumbled while looking over at Banshee for orders. "What should we do now? That guy's acting like he's on steroids or something, and now we have more defenders to deal with on top of him?"
But Banshee noticed the rest of the team on the roof and Kitty, moving down with her flying carpets to pick them up in groups. Thunderbird instantly grabbed his heavy cannon and began to fire at Reignfire, as did Colossus, while the carpet moved away from the building. She flew up to them, finding Cyclops looking only vaguely coherent, hiding his face behind one hand. "What happened to you, boyo?" Banshee asked, kneeling next to him and looking at him with concern.
"Telepathic assault, like what T'challa's men were dealing with before. They were waiting for us. Emma and Charles didn't beat them back; they pulled back on their own or under Sinister's command, not certain which, then waited behind some kind of dense shield that would keep them out," Cyclops muttered, still not looking at her, even as he let his hand fall away from his face to look at Banshee out of the corner of his well-protected eyes. "A fear-based assault. It took us all out except, I think, for Harry, and maybe Psylocke, since she's a telepath herself."
"Great," Rogue said brusquely, gesturing down towards where Reignfire had just slammed Sunfire into the side of the building with a blast of fire and was currently holding Rogue's arm, his hand on her armor beginning to hiss and spittle as he upped the heat. "We sure as hell could use the help here!"
Colossus nodded grimly and moved to the side of the carpet. "Get me directly above him," he ordered.
Cyclops nodded over to Kitty to follow Colossus's command while he tapped his headset. "Black Panther, we're cut off from pushing further," he said grimly, explaining what had happened. He then asked, "Can you get your recon drones over here and get us readings off of that building to tell us where that field is being generated from it or something?"
"I'll get my scientists on it," the Black Panther said instantly.
OOOOOOO
Within the building, Harry and Psylocke had continued to move down into the interior, cutting their way from one floor to another occasionally, sometimes taking the stairs, but always moving, never letting the defenders bog them down. Harry was now using his power more profligately, needing to make up for the loss of their fellows. And whenever the tidal wave of telepathic power subsided, Betsy would use her powers to scout around them to find enemies or prisoners.
They were now deep in the bowels of the building, and they hadn't seen any of the clones for the last few minutes, which caused Harry to ask, "How many floors has it been since we saw one of those Marauders?" He didn't like using the term, considering they weren't, after all, the first group of marauders he had known in his life, but when they shouted something along the lines of, 'We're the Marauders, and we're here to kill you,' every time you ran into a team of their clones, it tended to stick.
Psylocke thought, then said slowly, "I think four floors or so, something like that. And I think we're getting into Sinister's main base of operations. Certainly there's a lot more computers and stuff around, and…" She looked over at one of the doorways that they had bypassed by coming down through the roof, and Harry followed her gaze, noticing that the door had been metal and was one of the doors that would iris into the wall rather than on hinges.
Harry nodded then and gathered himself, casting several protective spells over Psylocke while also doing the same to himself, heightening his Magia Erebea spell to thirty percent. Given his powerup recently, he estimated that that would be enough to let him tangle with Colossus or the others, but not someone as strong as the Hulk. Still, he could up it to that level quickly enough, whereas when he had fought Thanos and the Hulk, most of his magic, around sixty percent, had been tied into the Magia Erebea spell.
Several minutes later they moved into a laboratory of some kind. Lines of computers with large screens covered the walls, a few dozen large glass containers sat around filled with the remains of different animals. At the far end of this lab, though, was a larger hatch, a massive metal construct. At its sides were two Gatling guns mounted on the wall, slowly traversing the short hall leading to it from the rest of the lab.
"After you, boss," Psylocke quipped, taking a step back and to one side so as to not be visible to whatever security system ran those guns.
"Can you tell if there are any minds behind that door?"
"None, or, if there are, they are blocking my senses," Psylocke replied.
"In that case, there's no need to be gentle any longer." Without further ado, Harry lashed out with the spell he liked to think of as his special doorknocker. "Fragor unda fortitudine!" A second later the door and the wall around it shattered into pieces, pieces which then exploded inwards.
With the doors and the guns protecting it gone, Harry led the way forward, magic still very visibly gathered around his hands as they walked into the unknown. At first the unknown behind that door didn't seem all that dangerous: it was again a lab with rows of destroyed computers interspersed with large glass containers, all of which were now shattered, blown apart by Harry's spell. But the lighting was bad, with only a bare bit of light coming in from the doorway they entered by and very few lighting fixtures visible in the ceiling. It was evident that, even at the best of times, this room was very dimly lit, if at all.
"Like something out of a sci-fi movie, this is. Sod this whole straight up assault lark. I'm not going to be cocked up by a face-hugger," Psylocke muttered, her normal upper-class accent dissipating for a moment before she took to the shadows to one side, ducking into them.
She did so very well indeed, almost disappearing even to Harry's senses. He idly wondered how she did that, but figured it was part of how she had been trained as the TV version of a ninja on Mojoworld.
He did agree with the sentiment, though, sending a nod in her direction even as he began to conjure small glowing lights and send them forth. Most of them were yellow, acting like little light bulbs in the air, flowing around the room and giving them so much light it was as if they were outside, almost. But two of them he created specially, whispering into them, "Seek!" before he let them fly off.
This was a spell he'd learned from the Camelot library in his rare down time, and one that had, ironically, been among the many prank spells the wizards here in this dimension had thought up. Those lights moved and bobbed among the others, seemingly without looking any different, until one of them moved to hover over a doorway leading into yet another room, and the other moved into the shadows to one side. An area, Harry realized, that didn't look as badly brutalized as the rest of the room was from his spell.
"Interesting," said a calm, almost urbane voice as Mr. Sinister himself stepped out of the darkness, his white skin practically glowing for a moment before he stepped into the light of the myriad magic balls. "Some kind of homing spell, I suppose. I'll say this for those of you who use magic, you can manipulate that mystical power to a far greater degree than most mutant powers could ever match, bar myself and perhaps a telekinetic. I wonder, do you think that makes you untouchable?"
Harry didn't respond verbally. Instead he lashed out with a spellchain: four cutting spells ending with Sectumsempra followed by three different variants of the entrails exploding curse, ending with a brute power lightning spell. The first was simply the usual entrails exploding curse, the second was a variant of the first centered on the eyeballs, and the third, filled your stomach with acid. The last spell was one of his basic lightning and Light-based spells, and it was the only spell he verbalized. "Drill of Light!"
Many of the other magic users he routinely interacted with would've blinked at the number of dark and painful spells that Harry had just launched. He was, after all, a good guy; Harry didn't normally use spells that killed his enemies in such incredibly painful manners. But Sinister had not only earned Harry's ire, he had earned his hatred.
Whatever his reasons, the man who was finally in front of Harry had tried to kidnap Harry's pregnant wife in all but name. He had launched this civil war during which thousands of innocents had died. He had been in control of the Mutant Liberation Front, which had indoctrinated more than a hundred young mutants worldwide into committing acts of terrorism. Any one of those reasons was enough for Harry to want to end this man's existence. All of them combined meant that he wanted it to be both quick and painful.
Sinister ducked aside, blasting at the visible magics that he could see with his own energy manipulation powers, creating concussive blasts of force from one hand and simpler energy blasts from the other. He took a step back and around one of the glass containers, which shattered as the eyeball exploding spell hit it. The last spell slammed into Sinister's chest, causing him to stumble backward as the energy of it hit him. But the lightning spell didn't do much, dissipating as if it had hit so much rubber.
He then returned fire, his hands both glowing purple as he shot out energy blasts. At the same time he lashed out with his limited telekinesis, grabbing up the various bits of debris that Harry's earlier spell had caused and hurling them at Harry from all around him.
Harry deflected them with a wave of his hand, tearing them from Mr. Sinister's control with an ease that Mr. Sinister had to blink in surprise at before Harry sent them right back at him. Sinister instinctively reached out again, grabbing at them and halting the various pieces of rubble-turned-shrapnel in the air, while Harry fought him for control, a sardonic, almost cruel smirk on Harry's face as he did. For a moment the rest of their fight stopped as both of them concentrated on controlling the debris, a visible sign of a struggle of will.
And then Psylocke announced herself by coming out of the darkness behind Sinister, her telekinetic blade suddenly glowing around one hand, which she aimed at the back of Sinister's head. He somehow sensed her, his own latent, entirely defensive ability with telepathy allowing him to sense her intent.
Turning quickly, Sinister grabbed her arm, twisted, and tossed her into the direction of the shrapnel that he and Harry had been fighting over, releasing his grip on it. But Harry was no fool, and the shrapnel moved around her, slamming into the walls and other containers like high-speed bullets while he teleported Psylocke away to another corner. There she scrambled again to hide behind one of the few remaining intact containers.
"You're not even going to let me get in a word edgewise?" Sinister said in the pause that followed this. "I thought you, at least, would wonder about my motivations, my reasons for doing what I have done."
Harry shook his head as he analyzed the way Sinister had dealt with his spells. Body transformation with the speed of thought, perhaps. energy manipulation which he can use to attack, and telekinesis. But not enough of anything to beat me. But he knows that, so where are his trump cards? "I know everything I want to know about you, Sinister. Your methods speak for themselves. What goal you are working towards, what reasons you think justify your actions, I could not care less about all of that. You tried to kidnap Jean, who is pregnant with our child. This is not going to end any other way but with your guts wrapped around your own fucking throat!"
Sinister grunted as another spell flew towards him, nearly hitting him before he could prepare himself, and he was forced to block it with a shield of concussive energy even as he hardened his body at the molecular level to take the blast. The spell, another lightning spell, struck and blasted through his shield but couldn't damage Sinister's currently rubber-like skin. But the next spell was another new spell that simply shot a nasty kind of acid at its target. The acid worked, since Sinister didn't know its composition enough to change his molecular structure enough to defend against it.
While outwardly he was still sneering at Harry, inside Sinister grimaced at the pain even as his body shifted to face it. He then ducked under another cutting spell, which he knew his body would not have been able to evolve fast enough to stop. "Magic users!" he grunted in annoyance. Magic was always very tricky to deal with, and while he could stop one set of spells at a time or perhaps two, given his general durability and ability to ignore concussive spells or exploding spells and others of that nature, that still left far too many spell types that could get through his durability, and he didn't want to test that durability if he didn't have to.
However, I have prepared for this. He smirked, stepping back to one side, and shouting, "Now, my dear queen!"
At that shout another telekinetic's power reached out through the room, pulling up panels from the ground and revealing votive offerings of some kind in small niches here and there. They flew into the air under the 'queen's' command, and they immediately began to glow with a bright blue light as Harry continued to throw out magic towards Sinister. Magic which stopped abruptly as Harry gasped, his magic once more almost seeming to try to fight him just like it had during his fight with MODOK.
"You're not the first magic user I've had to deal with, and though I would've preferred to have Le Fay here to help me deal with you, that only meant I had to fall back on more creative means," Sinister said calmly, stepping out from behind his hiding place and moving forward. A blast from one hand caught Psylocke as she tried to once again attack him from behind, slamming her back and through a wall with concussive force. The shields around her had instantly faded from the power of the votive offerings, just like the magic-stopping artifact Harry had already dealt with before. But her catsuit was also armored internally with Orichalcum scales, and she could take this kind of punishment fairly well.
She pushed herself out of the rubble groggily, quickly turning around to see what was happening inside the laboratory. The purple-haired woman didn't even notice that she had been smashed into another kind of laboratory lined with larger glass containers. These contained nothing at present, but each was labeled with the name of a different Marauder, starting with Arclight and Scalphunter and moving down in two long rows against the walls. But instead of noticing this she watched Harry, fearful as to what could happen now that his magic had been shut down. But she needn't have worried.
As the magic of the offerings tried to attack Harry, the bracelet Hela had crafted for him began to glow with a fierce purple and yellow light on his wrist, offsetting the anti-magic Blessing on the Catholic relics with its own from Hela. "Did you think I didn't know how vulnerable I was to religious blessings like that?" Harry asked sardonically, taking in a single breath as he recovered from the momentary pain. "I still have no idea how to combat them myself, but I don't have to. I have a certain goddess by my side, after all."
With the same hand on which the bracelet was glowing, Harry gestured and sent out four Reducio spells, each one slamming into a different idol, shattering them. And with his own magic having the added taste, as it were, of Hela's Blessing, one that was far newer and more powerful than the ones on the votive offerings, the Blessings within the offerings also shattered.
Sinister saw this happening and unleashed his next surprise, even as he knew he had lost his best chance at winning this fight. "I need you, my queen!"
From the alcove where Harry's second homing light ball had hovered, a woman strode. She was somewhat tall with a svelte frame, wearing something that looked a cross between a super villain costume and lingerie: black leather bustier, the lower half cut like a bathing suit in that it showed her legs from her upper thighs down, with a long V neck to it, the edges of which barely covered her nipples. The black leather was marked by spikes on the shoulders and wide metal teeth around where the leather covered her upper arms. Against her white skin the black leather was most striking, as was the red hair which encompassed her head, with a certain wild, unkempt appearance to it. On her hands she wore skintight gloves, and her boots were black leather as well, complete with stiletto heels.
But it was her jade eyes and her face that caused Harry's next round of attacks to stumble to a halt, because they were very familiar to Harry, as familiar as those of his other loves'. "What…the…bloody hell…is…this…" he intoned slowly as he stared at the woman.
She sneered back at him and lashed out with a telekinetic lash that lifted Harry up and hurled him back through the ruined hatchway into the rest of the office beyond, slamming him through one of the desks there to embed him in the wall. With a wrench of magical power Harry released himself from her grip even as she began a direct telepathic assault, only to frown in fury. "Even with him right in front of me like this I can't even find his mind, my love!"
"Then we must do this the old-fashioned way, my dear Madelyne," Sinister said, while Psylocke slowly slunk to the ground, forgotten by both of the villains for the moment as she stared at this weird, twisted mirror image of Jean Grey.
But even as that fight was going on, Cyclops and Thunderbird had begun to pressure the remaining defenders. A very visible sign of this was the exterior energy grid that had somehow blocked the two telepaths out from the building suddenly shutting off as the two villains began their attack on Harry. The Jean Grey look-alike stared around her as she felt that, scowling. "They found the Grounding Device! Should I retreat to our throne hall?"
"NoGH!" Sinister said even as he blocked a magical assault from Harry that would have carved his chest out. Instead it blasted him off his feet, and he stared as Harry walked back into the lab looking not even winded from the earlier assault. He simply powered through Mr. Sinister's own attacks as if they weren't even there, not allowing Sinister to even glance in the woman's direction. "I need your help here!"
Nodding, the Jean look-alike lashed out with her own telekinetic powers, trying to grab at Harry on the one hand while creating flaming demons and gremlins to attack him, tearing at the debris all around her and hurling it at Harry at the same time.
Harry blocked it all almost automatically while staring back at her as he shook his head slowly. "So, it's not just those Marauders that you can clone, Sinister?"
Harry had long known that this man had designs on Jean. He had known that Sinister liked to play god, cloning his most useful followers and then using them as pawns. But he had not connected those two concepts before this. Cloning the Marauders was one thing in Harry's mind, since they all were serial killers, and Harry felt, after talking to Mystique, that they had all agreed to follow Sinister, if not the cloning aspect.
But this, knowing that Sinister had cloned one of the loves of his life, made Harry realize anew the depths of Sinister's deceit. He not only played with the very bedrock of life, DNA, but also had no care for the individuality of his victims or their personal selves. Cloning Jean like this, manipulating the clone like this, it was almost like pseudo-raping her without touching the original at all.
As he thought of this and stared at this Jean-who-was-not-Jean, Harry's self-control slipped its leash. A magical aura sprang into being around him fit to nearly blind those who saw it as he roared, "HOW DARE YOU!?"
With that shout, Harry blasted out a massive cone of sheer brute force magic which annihilated all of Sinister's and the look-alike's attacks before smashing into them both like a runaway comet, hurling them backwards. Another spell exploded between the two of them even as they were still flying backward from the power of the first, and Madelyne's projected course was changed so that she slammed into one wall while and Sinister hit the other. Both of them recovered quickly, but now they were not in a position to be able to support one another.
Yet, even as he launched this attack, Harry was aware that the link between him and Jean, the real Jean, his Jean, was back. And her astral projection was was in his mind, clamoring for attention. "Harry, what the hell happened?! You… Hela's here and she said you were taking the fight to Sinister, but then our link… I, we got cut off, my love. It woke me up, and I… How, I mean, are you all right!?"
Relief, anger, and a lot of worry came through the link from Jean, so much so that Harry was worried about what the physical ramifications of her being so badly startled might be. It wasn't uncommon, after all, for high emotions like that to impact a woman's pregnancy, and that didn't even factor Jean's powers into the equation. "Calm down, Jean. I'm still here. I'm not even hurt, frankly. Sinister's developed some technological means to block out all psychic power, something we're going to have to look into. I'll tell you more about what's been going on here, but for now I need to concentrate on the world around me for a bit. I promise I'll be up to see you as soon as I can."
"You better, mister," Jean replied, soothed by the feelings of love and affection as well as determination that Harry had pushed through their link.
She faded to be replaced by the feeling of Emma, though, unlike Jean, she didn't project her astral self into his mind. Rather, she was simply there: waiting, maintaining their connection, but waiting for Harry to start talking to her rather than vice-versa. "Emma, I've just run into the telepath you've been fighting. She's away from the device she was using to up her power. Look through my eyes for a moment."
Emma did so, and Harry could feel her shock through their telepathic connection, her self-control having disappeared for a second. "Wh, how, what the hell… A clone, he cloned Jean. But then why…"
"There are mysteries here, mysteries we'll have to discover later. But right now, do you think you and Charles can do something about her? I don't want to kill her if I can help it. I have a feeling she's been indoctrinated almost as heavily as Hela was to play her role before we freed her."
"We can try, at least," Emma said into Harry's mind. With that the two telepaths began an assault on this clone of Jean Grey. But they were hampered both by the distance and by the lingering effects of the defensive field. There was also the odd fact that her telepathic presence in the astral plane was so small and thus difficult to target, yet another mystery.
And they couldn't quite do it. Jean Grey, or Madelyne as Sinister had called her, stiffened as their assault began, shouting out, "The telepaths are attacking again! I have to get to the throne room!" Before Sinister could say anything, she had turned and moved in the direction she'd come from, mentally fighting for her life against this new assault, almost ignoring the physical world around her.
Once more Psylocke saw her chance and lunged forward, body checking the other woman to the ground. The two of them rolled through the debris of the lab, with Madelyne getting cut here and there by pieces of glass and shards of metal, which Psylocke's body suit ignored. They ended up with Psylocke unfortunately below Madelyne, who had used her telekinetic powers to flip them at the last instant. The redhead slammed the other woman down with a hand on her chest, pressing her down as if her hand was the same weight as an elephant. At the same time more telekinetic energy gathered in her fist to come down like a giant hammer.
But then the unexpected occurred. Below the redhead, Psylocke, her head ringing, winked up at her. "Hey, beautiful." It was so out there, so random, that it froze Madelyne for a second as the purple-haired woman had hoped. Then Psylocke's hand flashed up, slamming a telepathic blade up into the other woman's chin and then up into her brain.
This blade wasn't like most of the ones Psylocke used. It was telepathic in nature, barely having enough telekinetic presence to make the outer edge of the odd dagger shape that was visible in the physical world. If she had hit any other body part with a blade like this, it wouldn't have done more than bruise, if that. But she had thrust it up into Madelyne's brain and released the idea the telepathic part of the blade contained: pain.
That pain lit up in Madelyne's head, and she screamed before a blow from Psylocke to the stomach caused her to double over the other woman. There Psylocke grabbed her head in both hands and then slammed her head into the ground next to her, knocking her out.
Then Psylocke rolled out from underneath her, shaking her head loosely and thinking that maybe she had her own slight concussion from where the woman had smashed her down to the ground in the first place. Still, I think my part in this fight is over.
Elsewhere, without Madelyne to back him up, Sinister could barely last long enough to realize that his aid was down, and that only because of his ability to change his body to match the elemental attacks that were Harry's preference. But when Harry, in his anger about Sinister's cloning of Jean, began to use pure magical assaults to go with his acid-based and Darker spells, the fight ended within seconds. Nothing Sinister could do could give him the magical durability to withstand these spells.
A magical blast of acid struck Mr. Sinister while his body was still configured to handle electrical and other elemental attacks, and it seared straight through his body's remaining durability, starting to burn from the inside. The entrails spell latched on as the albino scientist was trying to force his body to deal with that assault.
Mr. Sinister screamed as his own insides began to broil, the magic he'd been hit with fighting him for control. It was only his manipulation of his body at a molecular level that kept him going at that point, and that wasn't a mercy as Harry started forward to end him. "Blackfyre!" Harry growled, and the almost-living fire of the Black family struck, immolating Mr. Sinister from the waist up, his upper body ceasing to exist, the fire was so hot.
As his legs fell to the side, Harry stared at them, then judiciously conjured up more flame, and then still more, until the entire area of the lab where Sinister had fallen was burned to so much ash. Watching, Psylocke coughed delicately and asked solicitously, "Ahem, um, are you all right, boss?"
"I'm just fine," he said, smiling somewhat manically over at her. "I just believe in being thorough, that's all."
"Riiight," Psylocke drawled, then slowly got to her feet to face the door as the sound of racing feet reached their ears.
Thankfully, however, it was Cyclops who led the way into the room with the rest of the team behind him. All of them stopped and stared at the shocking red hair in among the rubble as Psylocke hauled the unconscious woman that Sinister had called Madelyne to her feet. "What the… Wait, clones," Cyclops said coldly, shaking his head. "Right. I hope that Sinister is dead now?"
"Very dead," Harry said with a nod, gesturing to his feet where literally nothing remained, even the metal and wood of the floor having been burned to nothing. Even as he did so, Harry felt tired. Not physically—Sinister had honestly not been much of a threat alone—but rather his mind and emotions were tired. It's been a long fucking day. And I want to see Jean and the others. But damn me if I don't still have work to do. "Now we have to deal with the fallout…"
OOOOOOO
General Petronov of the 2nd army group walked into the reserve headquarters of the Belorussia Reserve Guard's largest base near the Polish border, glaring angrily all around him as he did so. Nowhere was there the haste and energy that he had expected to see, and he growled angrily to himself as he marched into the commanding officer's office, marched up to that general's desk, and slammed his hands down on it. "What kind of game are you playing at, General Koso!"
The man at the desk was far smaller than he was and had nothing of his lean, athletic build, being rather dumpy for a soldier, which fit his being a reserve soldier rather than a serving officer. He looked up at the other man unflinchingly, however. "I am doing nothing, as you can see. No orders have come through from our local representative that would require me to aid you and your forces."
"The invaders are but hours away from the border, and you will play these political games! You will follow my orders as President Turpin has ordered in times of war, or else I will have you shot for disobedience in the face of the enemy!"
"Nyet, I will not," the other man said with a thin smile. "Not until you prove you're not an alien."
For a moment the general's eyes widened, and then he blustered, "What?" accompanied by a reasonable expression of simple shock. "What do you mean, an alien? What madness is this, or is this some plot from the Poles? Have they bought you off that you would spout such nonsense!?"
"An alien," the man across the desk said simply. "I have seen evidence being passed about through the grapevine and over the interweb, which is once more open to us, I might add, that Russia has been duped into doing the work of aliens as that British magic user, Potter, has been warning of. Certainly, that makes more sense than our use of a weapon that would've taken the entire world back into the ice age!"
There the general's tone turned angry, and he glared at Petronov, or perhaps the alien wearing his skin. "Even we Russians, who pride ourselves on enjoying winter, would not have enjoyed such a thing."
"Such talk proves your treason!" Petronov barked, gesturing his two guards forward.
"The treason is only on those who willingly work with the aliens, if they exist. And what will allaying my fears that you are not one cost you, comrade?" the man asked, putting a sardonic lilt on the last word.
Four other men entered the room. Two of them were guards carrying guns, the other two were carrying crude looking, cobbled-together devices built around a set of infrared goggles, pointing them at the general and his two guards. "This will but take a moment," Koso replied. "And then, if you are human, perhaps I will start following your orders. That will depend upon the orders, of course."
Before the two men could activate their devices, Petronov's guards whipped up their guns and shot them and their guards in a blast of machine gun fire before turning back to the general in his seat.
Koso, however, had already slammed his hand on a button underneath his desk's top, and one wall of his office opened, revealing rows of other troopers with submachine guns in hand. Without any order from Koso, they rained a bullet hell into the room, killing both the Army general and his two guards. As Koso and his men watched, the three new bodies slowly began to dissipate as they hit the floor, and the Belorussian pushed himself out of his chair, moving around his desk to lean down and watch as it occurred before shaking his head and looking over at his men. "Well, I suppose that proves the story of aliens, yes?"
More than one of the men there looked a little shocked, but many of them simply nodded. And the general straightened up. "Get the word out! We have our proof. No Belorussian will be an alien's tools! It might well be time for a glorious revolution."
OOOOOOO
Harry's demand to surrender was heard by every individual on the small island as night fell. "To the Mutant Liberation Front members among you. You have been duped, lied to. Mr. Sinister is dead, his cloned followers, the Marauders are dead. He posed as the High Genegineer as well as your leader and played both sides of this battle against one another, not in an attempt to conquer this island but to entrap myself and my team. He failed. I say again, you have been lied to. Please surrender. No one else needs to die today. No one else needs to die for this man's madness."
Something in his words got through to many of the Mutant Liberation Front members. They slowly came over the lines, moving to the port city and surrendering, simply sitting around the outer edge of the shield that was still there, their hands in their laps. With Sinister dead, the Mutant Liberation Front was now headless, and with the majority of the Marauders dead, they no longer even had most of their cell leaders. With that, they lacked anyone who could light a fire under them to continue the fight. That and a lot of them had already begun to question how things were going as this civil war had bogged down.
But the Press Gang were still determined to fight on. The rank-and-file of them were filled with mutant haters, the easier for Sinister to control and aim them once he seized power and started to hand out his toys to them. But there weren't many of them left, not after having pushed most of their forces into the city in an effort to overwhelm the Wakandan and marine forces there. And there Harry's golem army had ground most of them to powder during half a day of blood and slaughter, of metal and flesh against endless stone and concrete.
Harry would leave Thunderbird and Cyclops behind with the rest of the team here to deal with the remainder, however.
"And what will you be doing?" Cyclops asked sardonically as he looked at a map of the island which Emma was updating with the locations of the various holdout groups of the Press Gang and a few random civilian gangs who were ravaging the countryside here and there. Though few in number, they too would have to be dealt with.
"I'm going to return up to High Note and talk to Jean. Before that, I'll put Madelyne in stasis for a time until we figure out what's going on there and what we want to do with her. Beyond that…" Harry shook his head, sighing faintly as he looked, not at the map of Genosha, but out over the dark waters beyond the port, where the lights of incoming ships could be seen in the dark. "The war's over. Now we work for peace and hope that doing so is not as hard as winning the war was."