Rin's POV
"Remind me to never listen to anything you say seriously again," I shouted into my mental link with Spider-Man as the ship buckled and broke apart all around us.
"You were on board with the idea!" Peter shouted back as he webbed together two panels that were coming apart and fired a beam of heat that sealed them together. The broken rune arrays stitched themselves back together automatically at Uriel's prompting.
"Is this really the time for this?" Scott shouted at the top of his voice from the medical bay.
The ship had started to fall apart the second we left Dante's dimension and entered chaotic inter-dimensional space. Everybody had thrown themselves into fixing the ship, producing metal non-stop, enchanting, mending the hull, and bolstering our defenses, all while we carefully siphoned energy from the void to increase the ship's resistance to inter-dimensional energy and bolster our personal resistances.
All the mutants had fallen ill almost immediately, but we slowly bounced back over the following weeks. I got the worst of it, degenerating so much that I lost muscle mass and my energy stores shrank. But we recovered. Our armors learned to resist the chaotic energy thanks to my mutation and Armando's, and eventually healed them.
I didn't take the easy way out. I waited until my body learned to process and metabolize the unusual energy and came out stronger on the other side. The Sentinels kept the ship afloat while we were all on bed rest for weeks, each pushing themselves to develop increasingly complex and effective runic shielding arrays and weapons to ensure we survived our current ordeal. They also churned out more bodies with limited AIs to handle most of the grunt work and maintenance of the ship.
The days rolled into weeks spent in the void, jostling in mind-wracking fear and ever-shifting turbulence. Just when we thought our shielding was dense enough, it would crack again when a massive wave crashed into it.
Some of us were beginning to fear we would spend eternity traveling in the void until something changed.
My eyes.
They turned silver.
Just like I'd gained new abilities after prolonged exposure to the Soul, Space, Time, and Mind Stones, absorbing several suns' worth of inter-dimensional energy let me see pathways in the vast sea of dimensional chaos. Hidden roadways I could force open with enough power. However, once I'd chosen one, I'd be set on that path. There would be no going back. Chaotic space would suck us in and propel us toward that new reality no matter what.
We didn't arrive at the decision to leave lightly. We still hadn't figured out our shielding; most of our human crew were still recovering from the inter-dimensional energy exposure, even the unconscious mutants. And the pressure and turbulence could very well rip us apart before we arrived at our destination.
"We're dead either way," Logan didn't mince his words, and the rest of the X-Men agreed.
"So, let's give ourselves the best shot at survival, then," I said.
We took every precaution. Uriel and the Sentinels had the Bots working around the clock, churning out batteries to soak in dimensional energy, and Azrael had managed to program a facsimile of the System Master used to gauge his abilities and categorize his improvements.
By his metrics, the ship had a little over 350,000,000 Energy within its core to power shields and other essential functions, but that was only the start of our preparation. We reshaped the ship, abandoning the outer layers and reinforcing the walls so that we could spend them as shielding should the hull be breached.
We also installed Amplification runes all around the innermost sanctum, meant to channel counterattacks that Azrael and Uriel cooked up to counter the chaotic waves, gravitational forces, and pressure we were sure to face, among other things.
We spent nearly a week obsessively planning and learning. And during that time, my opinion of Peter Parker improved radically. He could keep up intellectually with the Sentinels, completing their thoughts and coming up with new technologies and ideas on the spot.
Honestly, it was intimidating. I felt like a bit of a brute, skilled only in warfare and death.
The roadway we chose was a place I thought we could thrive. Somewhere called the Invincible Universe. Dante had talked about traveling there and had gone into details about the dangers: the Viltrumites, the Coalition of Planets, the villains.
They weren't exactly insubstantial, even to me at this stage of power, but they were manageable.
So, when it was time, I gathered an ocean's worth of energy into myself and teleported out onto a boardwalk at the very tip of the ship in my full armor. It moved and felt like a second skin more than anything else. Covered in runes with sleek panels and grooves, it was miles beyond where it'd started and provided me with thousands of stat points. Yamato appeared in my waiting hand, summoned from my ring, and I let out a deep breath in preparation.
The violent static of inter-dimensional space chewed through the Aegis covering my armor, briefly overloading the absorption enchantment with spikes in energy every now and then.
Unsheathing the weapon, I raised it above my head and let the blade fall, parting the chaos and revealing a tunnel of churning dimensional space. Rotating my shoulder, I swept outward, widening the pathway into a star.
As predicted, a sort of vacuum pulled on the ship, almost pulling us off equilibrium as we barreled into the pathway. I blinked into the ship before the first of the dimensional waves hit.
Azrael hit a rune, discharging a dimensional slash that carved a path for us. Another rune bathed the dimensional tunnel around us in Anathema fire, and another discharged a continuous gravitic wave that pushed back against all disturbance while simultaneously accelerating us toward the exit of the tunnel.
It was up ahead, thousands of miles away. A pinprick in space where the chaos stopped. And all we had to do was ride it out.
Better said than done.
A quarter of the way in, the hull split, prompting Uriel and a few others to vanish and patch it up, while the X-Men and Yelena remained in the med bay where our mutant passengers were still sleeping.
I yelled at Peter, naturally, blaming him for suggesting we endure interdimensional space in the first place, and we patched and repaired as much as we could.
A dozen or so miles out from the exit, the craft finally snapped in half. What I could only describe as a tsunami nearly enveloped the ship, forcing every Sentinel and me out. We attacked as one—I, with a thousand and one fists, carrying Space and dimensional energy, and the rest with their attacks of choice. It cleared a path for us, but only just. The ship was on fire and in free fall when we finally exited chaotic dimensional space. The craft twisted through the stratosphere, and most of the Sentinels had taken substantial damage, leaving me the only one healthy enough to set things right before we crashed into the rapidly approaching surface of Earth.
No.
We didn't come all this way just to let something like this stop us.
I teleported, swooping every single Sentinel into spatial pockets and flinging them into the craft before I steadied the ship with telekinesis.
I looked downward, my eyes picking out an empty beach miles below, and I teleported. Everybody would recover fairly quickly thanks to their armor, but until then, I had to stand guard and play peacekeeper and defender to the curious humans and dangerous entities that called this place home.