Magneto and Doom cared little for the purpose of the Illuminati.
No—both had joined for their own reasons, selfish ones, though how selfish those reasons truly were remained open to interpretation.
Doom had ambitions of ruling the world, of claiming all power as his own. He did not see this as villainy; he had his reasons, reasons he believed justified his vision. Whatever those might be, he had judged that joining the Illuminati would serve his goals better than opposing it.
As a member of the Illuminati, Doom now acted above the law. No longer did he need to fear intervention. Not from the United Nations. Not from NATO. Not even from coalitions formed explicitly to oppose him.
The expansion of his empire could no longer be stopped by international pressure.
Victor von Doom was now, legally, beyond international law.
Of course, the trade-off was clear. The other members of the Illuminati possessed the authority to act against him if they deemed his actions to exceed the council's mandate. His diplomatic immunity as the sovereign ruler of a sovereign nation was effectively voided.
A trade, yes—but one Doom believed more than worth it.
As for Magneto, his reasons were different.
He required the protection and authority of an Illuminati seat to act freely. He was, after all, a wanted criminal—a global terrorist hunted by nearly every nation on Earth.
And while the rise of Arthuria had softened anti-mutant sentiment in parts of Europe, the reality remained unchanged elsewhere. Mutants were still feared. Still hunted.
And Magneto was the most feared of them all.
It was a title he wore proudly—the crown of mutants.
He had never crowned himself king, but Arthuria had done so for him, and the title had its advantages.
With Albion as a safe haven, Magneto could openly gather mutants from across the world. There, he judged their abilities, their resolve. Those willing and capable were trained to wield their powers properly, safely, and effectively.
Once, the Brotherhood of Mutants had numbered barely a dozen.
Now there were hundreds of powerful mutants ready to fight for the cause—and thousands more, less powerful but still useful, loyal to his banner.
Logistics remained an issue. Transporting and deploying such forces was no small task.
But with the Illuminati, those limitations faded.
Magneto could walk the streets of any American city he desired. Police and military forces were powerless to act against him. And this was only the beginning of what his seat offered.
With Reed Richards, Tony Stark, and S.H.I.E.L.D.'s resources behind him, Magneto now had access to intelligence he could never have dreamed of.
Every secret anti-mutant project on the planet was laid bare.
Such initiatives required funding—vast amounts of it. And with Stark's AI monitoring global financial systems, hiding those transfers had become impossible. State funding. Private donations. Black projects. All exposed.
Magneto had already begun compiling a list of the most influential and wealthy enemies of mutantkind.
People he would visit personally.
Or have others visit for him.
He was, after all, the King of Mutants now. He could hardly waste his time confronting every short-sighted billionaire clinging desperately to a dying version of humanity.
As for Arthuria—she was no threat.
At least, not one he needed to concern himself with anytime soon.
Magneto believed he understood her.
Dangerous? Yes.
Deadly? Certainly.
Powerful? Incomprehensibly so.
But she was also deeply isolationist.
As long as her people did not suffer, she showed little interest in the wider world. She would act against injustice if it crossed her path—but she would not chase it.
She was not like Charles.
Not like Captain America.
She was no hero.
She was a ruler.
A king.
A tyrant.
A goddess.
She demanded obedience. She would not tolerate corruption within her domain. If a government failed her people, she would not reform it—she would destroy it and build something better in its place.
Peace and prosperity would follow.
She knew she had flaws. And so she restrained herself.
A foolish notion, perhaps—but Magneto would not look a gift horse in the mouth.
If she offered the rest of the world the freedom to shape its own destiny…
Then he would gladly take it.
Mutantkind had a future now.
And that future was not survival.
It was dominion.
As was their rightful place.
"I believe," Magneto began, his voice calm but firm, "that dealing with the Sentinel Project should be the first proper task we concentrate on."
He himself cared little for the idea of giant mutant-hunting machines.
After all, he was the master of magnetism.
That power alone rendered him nearly invincible in the modern world. Steel, circuitry, alloys—no matter how advanced, all bent to his will. Even Iron Man, for all his brilliance, would be helpless before him. No matter how sophisticated a metal suit might be, to Magneto it was nothing more than an easily crushed container.
He did, however, grudgingly admit that the weapons of the Asgardians—and the relics wielded by the Knights of Camelot—might lie beyond the reach of his magnetic dominion.
But robots?
Robots were another matter entirely.
Still, Magneto was not so arrogant as to think only of himself.
Advanced machines designed specifically to hunt and kill mutants posed a far greater danger to the rest of mutantkind—mutants without the power to tear tanks apart or bend satellites from orbit. To them, Sentinels were not inconveniences. They were executioners.
Worse still, Magneto had long since learned never to underestimate human ingenuity.
Even non-mutants were capable of creating deadly wonders.
And when that brilliance was focused entirely on extermination—on eliminating mutants—it had a habit of producing truly horrid abominations.
Neutralizers.
Inhibitors.
Weapons designed not merely to kill, but to strip a mutant of what made them who they were.
Temporary, perhaps—but still a threat.
And threats like that could not be allowed to mature.
Better to crush them early.
Better to end them before they ever reached the field.
Magneto's words lingered in the air for a moment.
Then Tony leaned back in his chair, fingers steepled, eyes unfocused in that way that meant his brain had already sprinted several steps ahead of the room.
"Okay," he said slowly, "so we agree the problem isn't robots."
A few heads turned toward him.
"The problem," Tony continued, "is who builds them, why, and who they answer to."
Magneto's gaze sharpened. "You're suggesting a countermeasure."
"I'm suggesting," Tony corrected, "that we stop playing whack-a-mole with secret death projects and do what humans are actually good at."
He gestured vaguely with one hand.
"Standardization. Oversight. Scale."
Reed Richards tilted his head slightly, already following the line of thought. "You're proposing a centralized automated force."
Tony snapped his fingers. "Bingo. These people aren't entirely wrong; humanity's just outmatched. We saw what Asgardians can do, and even those aliens that were clearly expendable swarm units were as strong as Cap here."
"I could handle them," Steve quickly defended himself—he had handled himself well against the Chitauri.
"Maybe," Reed acknowledged, "but Stark isn't wrong. It is clear that the Asgardians, despite their strange and very inconsistent level of technology, have mastered their own biology, enhancing their entire species to beyond superhuman levels."
Reed had always believed this to be the truth. This was a theory he came up with the first time Loki did a world tour, proudly proclaiming himself and Asgard far superior to Earth and humanity.
He didn't buy into the whole god narrative, even now. Despite seeing what Arthuria claimed and showed them, he still didn't believe in gods and magic. That was just a science he hadn't yet mastered.
His private talks with Tony, about how Arthuria herself had described magic, or magecraft, clearly supported that theory.
Magecraft was just using energy to bypass the process; another process was using energy differently.
Nothing less, nothing more.
"Humanity is already entering the next stage; mutants are humanity's future." Magneto quickly interjected as he grasped where they were going.
"Humanity is already entering the next stage," Magneto said sharply, cutting in as he grasped where the conversation was drifting. "Mutants are humanity's future."
Tony glanced at him sideways. "Future, sure. But present?" He shrugged. "Present's still getting punched through walls by things that don't care about genetics."
Reed nodded slowly. "The data supports Stark's concern. Mutants represent potential, not uniformity. The average human—mutant or otherwise—is catastrophically underprepared for the kinds of threats we've already encountered."
"The Chitauri," Steve said quietly.
"And Asgard," Reed continued. "And whatever comes next."
Tony leaned forward now, elbows on the table. "Look, nobody's talking about replacing people. This isn't about supremacy. It's about coverage."
Magneto's eyes narrowed. "Coverage."
"A shield," Tony said. "One that doesn't sleep, doesn't panic, and doesn't decide an entire group deserves to die because of bad day or bad intel."
"You mean machines," Magneto said flatly.
"I mean tools," Tony replied just as flatly. "Big difference."
Reed folded his arms. "A distributed autonomous system could, in theory, intercept threats before escalation. Missile launches. Unauthorized weapons programs. Sentinel deployment."
Magneto's attention snapped back to him. "You would give machines the authority to decide what constitutes a threat?"
"No," Tony said. "We'd give them parameters."
"And who sets those parameters?" Magneto asked.
The silence that followed was brief—but heavy.
"We do," Steve said at last.
Every eye turned to him.
"We don't hand over judgment," Steve continued. "We keep it. The machines act fast, but we decide what matters."
Magneto studied him for a long moment.
"You trust yourselves a great deal," he said.
Tony smiled thinly. "I trust us more than I trust governments quietly green-lighting genocide projects."
That earned him no argument.
In truth, Tony had been thinking about something like this for a while now—ever since he carried the nuke through that portal, ever since he saw what lay beyond it.
He had no doubt that even with Asgard's help, humanity would have fallen if not for the Chitauri being forced to only attack from the portal, making a massive bottleneck in their deployment.
If they had the freedom to attack Earth from every direction, Earth wouldn't have stood a chance, and even if the Asgardians could kill every Chitauri who landed, they couldn't do so before they wiped out every last human.
No, Earth needed a shield, a way to protect itself from the threats out there, and he could already see it:
A thousand thousand suits of armor protecting the planet.
And while he could make them himself, he figured that if the government were already building robots to commit mutant genocide, then they could take over those resources and put them to better use.
Still, he couldn't help but glance at Doom. He didn't trust that man at all, and he would have to be sure he wasn't a part of any reprogramming or anything when it came to making this robot, planetwide defense force.
If he did, Tony was sure it was only a matter of time before they would have to deal with their own robots when they started to go around proclaiming Doom the emperor of Earth.
(End of chapter)
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