"Professor, what is the plan now?!" At this critical, horrifying moment, Jean Grey was the only thing preventing them from being instantly drowned. Her arms were stretched, trembling violently, a field of sheer, straining telekinetic force pushing back against the black, raging torrent of Lake Alkali.
Every muscle in her body screamed, her pupils dilated with the effort. All eyes, wide with sheer terror, focused on Charles, the perceived intellectual and spiritual backbone of the X-Men.
"Scott, blast the adjacent tunnel wall! Disperse the water flow and buy us mere seconds!" Charles, his face pale with exertion and pain from his earlier mental clash with Huang Wen, immediately barked the command.
Scott, Cyclops, didn't hesitate. He unleashed a full-power, crimson optical blast from his visor. The destructive force tore through the reinforced concrete of the side room, violently rupturing the wall and diverting a fraction of the deluge. This provided a momentary, explosive relief as some of the water rushed into the new opening.
However, the X-Men remained trapped in the primary channel of the massive flood. The temporary diversion did little to alleviate the overwhelming pressure on Jean.
Worse, the shattered chunks of rock, rebar, and concrete from Cyclops's blast were now incorporated into the raging current, turning the water into a grinding, heavy slurry that redoubled the stress on Jean Grey's collapsing field. She gasped, a thin line of blood trickling from her nose.
"Professor, Jean can't hold this for much longer! Look at her!" Cyclops shouted, his voice cracking with urgency and deep fear for his beloved Jean.
"Eric… forgive me!" Charles murmured, his gaze falling upon Magneto, who was sprawled on the floor, propped up by one of the younger, terrified mutants. A grim, resolute realization hardened Charles's expression. This was their only chance.
Magneto, despite the blinding agony in his head and the chilling numbness in his legs, immediately understood the suicidal necessity in Charles's tone. They had to fuse their powers—a forbidden, dangerous, and incredibly painful act—if they were to survive the golden man's lingering curse.
"Don't apologize, Charles! Let's get the rest of these poor fools out alive first, it's better than all of us dying here!" Magneto roared, gritting his teeth against the fresh spike of pain that radiated from his head whenever he focused. He ripped his specialized helmet off his head and tossed it aside, the act a surrender to the inevitable psychic assault.
"BUZZ! AH! AHHH!"
As Magneto finished speaking, a titanic wave of pure, concentrated mental force erupted from Charles's shattered psyche, slamming into Magneto's unprotected brain. The psychic trauma was immense, triggering the residual damage left by Huang Wen's nerve strike. The two former friends screamed in unison, their combined, raw agony echoing horrifyingly in the collapsing tunnel.
But the sheer force of their united will achieved the impossible. Immediately, a thick, seamless wall of metallic alloys—pulled from the structure of the tunnel itself and reinforced by Magneto's pain-fueled rage—shot up between the X-Men and the raging torrent. Jean's straining telekinetic field, now relieved of the physical pressure, snapped back, and she nearly collapsed into Cyclops's waiting arms.
"Quick, go! This wall won't hold for long…" Magneto muttered, his voice barely a rasp. Charles's voice, equally strained, echoed the command.
Then, with one last, terrible surge of combined power, they screamed again. "AAAAH!"
In front of the assembled mutants, a passage was violently ripped open in the ceiling. A twisted, hastily formed metal ladder descended into the narrow, dark opening—a ventilation shaft leading to the outside world.
With that final, cataclysmic exertion, Magneto's eyes rolled up into his head, and he lost consciousness, completely collapsing onto the floor. Charles's body began to tremble uncontrollably, the agony of pushing his mind past its limits compounding the invisible damage inflicted by Huang Wen.
Charles, fighting through a haze of nauseating pain, forced his eyes open and looked at the stunned Jean Grey. "I… I feel Eric's injury, Jean… The psychic counter-attack… The rest… is up to you. You must take them. You can do it…"
With that final, desperate plea, Charles Xavier finally succumbed to the overwhelming exhaustion and pain, slumping forward in his abandoned wheelchair, falling into a deep, protective coma. The fate of the X-Men now rested entirely on the shoulders of the traumatized, weary survivors.
"Let's move!" Cyclops took a deep, shaky breath, the mantle of absolute leadership suddenly crushing his soul. He helped the gasping Jean Grey toward the hastily opened ventilation duct. The others followed suit, hoisting the unconscious Charles and Magneto along with the injured Mystique and the petrified younger mutants.
The ventilation shaft offered a brief respite, a passage of silence and relative safety, but when they finally emerged, clawing their way out of the earth onto the precarious mountainside surrounding the lake, a new, more terrifying problem presented itself.
Their stealth jet, the only means of rapid transport, was gone—destroyed in the earlier chaos. The base's helicopters were nowhere in sight. More critically, above them, the Alkali Lake Dam, which had been holding back millions of gallons of water, was giving way completely.
"BOOOOM!"
The sound was apocalyptic. A massive chasm tore open in the central dam structure, and the entire lake began to empty. A mountain of water, roaring and frothing, surged down the slope, guaranteeing to utterly obliterate every living thing in the valley, including the exhausted X-Men.
"Perhaps, the Professor truly made a grave error," Jean Grey whispered, her voice barely audible over the roaring flood, the thought echoing the guilt felt by everyone present. "If we hadn't turned on Huang Wen… out of respect for Logan, he would have carried us all to safety easily. At most, we would have lost Eric, who was our enemy anyway. But now… look at us."
She pushed Cyclops away, stepping forward with a resolute, terrifying calm. Her body began to shimmer, not with telekinetic blue, but with a faint, aggressive golden-red light—the nascent, protective glow of the Phoenix Force. She stretched out her hands, and the turbulent, raging torrent, moving with the force of an avalanche, instantly split in two.
The sight was biblical, but unsustainable. Jean was struggling not just against the water, but against the awakening cosmic entity within her. Her face was contorted in agony, her body shaking like a leaf.
"What do we do? We're trapped! We're going to be washed away!" cried one of the younger mutants, his voice a wail of despair.
Even with the floodwaters parted, they were surrounded by the rapidly swelling lake, trapped on a tiny, rapidly dissolving ledge. And everyone knew the terrible, unavoidable truth: Jean Grey could not hold that power for long.
"Jean…" Cyclops fired an emergency concussive blast into the center of the divided water, a pathetic, desperate attempt to relieve the pressure, but it was nothing more than a ripple in the face of the massive, overwhelming force.
"The Professor entrusted me with your safety, Scott. I must fulfill that promise. I must repay his kindness," Jean took a deep, shuddering breath, the Phoenix glow intensifying. She stretched out her other hand toward the cluster of survivors—the injured, the disabled, the unconscious, and the terrified.
The next moment, everyone's bodies floated up, lifted by an overwhelming psychic current.
"Jean! Jean, what are you doing?! Stop it right now!" Cyclops shrieked, realization dawning in a wave of cold horror.
"I'm saving you all," Jean whispered, her voice consumed by the power of the cosmic entity now fully engaging her physical form. She began controlling every single body—lifting them with pinpoint accuracy—slowly raising them higher and pushing them outward, away from the valley of inevitable destruction.
"No! Jean! Put me down! I don't want to go! I'm staying with you!" Cyclops struggled violently, screaming her name, but he was utterly helpless against the raw, unrefined power of the Phoenix. He could only watch in crushing, tearful agony as his body flew further and further away, until Jean Grey's shimmering, golden-red figure was obscured by the mist and the thunderous, splitting curtain of water.
When their bodies finally landed with a bone-jarring, rough thump on a higher ridge several hundred yards away, they turned back. The curtain of water had snapped shut. The dam's final collapse swallowed the entire valley floor, and Jean Grey was gone, consumed by the self-generated, righteous catastrophe.
"NOOOO!" Cyclops, falling to his knees in the dirt, let out a primal scream of anguish, tears streaming from beneath his visor. He scrambled to run back toward the raging torrent, but Ororo, Storm, blocked his path, her eyes flooded with tears of her own.
"Scott, stop! If you go there, you will only die as well!" Ororo implored, grabbing his suit with desperate strength. She glanced back at the scattered, injured members of the team—the unconscious Charles and Magneto, the bruised and disoriented young mutants, the crippled Mystique. "Don't you dare forget your duty! You are the leader of the X-Men now! Our ordeal is far from over!"
Ororo was devastatingly right. The X-Men had suffered heavy losses. They had survived the flood, but they had fallen hard. Most of the mutants had sustained injuries from the uncontrolled crash-landing.
They had no transportation, their mentor was comatose, their powerful ally was dead (Jean), and their enemy was paralyzed. The nearest sign of civilization was miles away. This small, broken group of survivors—an assortment of the elderly, the weak, and the disabled—was stranded.
"I…" Cyclops desperately wanted to throw himself into the water, to search for any sign of Jean, but the crushing weight of his responsibility as captain slammed into him. He had to secure the survivors first.
"The Professor made a mistake…" Ororo thought, looking at the two comatose figures of Charles and Magneto lying side-by-side on the cold ground. She sighed, her heart heavy with grief and regret. Charles's actions had not only led to this disaster but had completely destroyed his image as a kind, wise, and infallible leader in the hearts of his most loyal students.
"If Huang Wen hadn't fallen out with us, we would have been home within the hour, safe and sound. At most, we would have sacrificed Eric, a man who plotted our extinction. But now, we lost Jean… and we're left to crawl home on our hands and knees."
Cyclops, visibly forcing his trauma down, took a deep, ragged breath. The time for grieving was over; the time for leadership had begun.
"Alright. Everyone who can still walk, listen to me," he commanded, his voice raw but firm. "Help your companions find sturdy branches for crutches. We move together. We support each other. We start walking until we find help!"
The broken, defeated remnants of the X-Men began the long, agonizing march away from the ruins of Alkali Lake, carrying the full weight of their self-inflicted misery.