The Nevada desert heat pressed down on the scorched earth. Hidden beneath the shifting sands of the Yucca Flat, the decommissioned Hulkbuster base sat.
Peter Parker adjusted his mask, the specialized filters he had Ethan integrate into the lenses cutting through the shimmering heat haze. Beside him, Emma Frost stood in a suit of tactical white that looked entirely too expensive for a desert infiltration, while Felicia Hardy checked the seals on her charcoal-grey suit, her emerald eyes narrowed against the glare.
"They know we're here," Peter whispered, his voice cracking the stillness. "There's a sensor underground a mile wide."
"Then there's no point in hiding," Emma replied, her voice a cool breeze in the stifling heat. "Subtlety was never an option for this stage. You are the vanguard, Mr. Parker. Make enough noise to draw their attention."
Peter didn't need further instruction. He launched himself from the rocky outcrop, a streak of red and blue. As he crossed the invisible perimeter, the sand erupted.
Three Mark IV Sentinels, buried chest-deep in the dunes as silent sentries, lurched into the air. Their massive, violet-hued frames shed tons of dust like shedding skin. "NON-MUTANT SIGNATURE DETECTED. DESIGNATION HOSTLE. ENGAGE WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE," the lead unit boomed, its chest cavity glowing with the build-up of a thermal blast.
"Hey, giant, purple, and ugly!" Peter yelled, firing a web-line onto the Sentinel's shoulder. "I'm not a mutant, but I appreciate the inclusive welcome!"
While the desert turned into a kaleidoscopic nightmare of palm-repulsors and sonic cannons, Emma and Felicia moved. With the Sentinels' sensors locked onto the high-velocity target looping around their heads, the two women slipped toward the primary ventilation intake.
Emma glided, her form shimmering as she shifted into her diamond state. In this form, she was a living weapon, a goddess of carbon that ignored the laws of physics. Felicia, however, was acutely aware of her own mortality.
Behind them, the battle raged. Peter was a blur of calculated chaos. He realized quickly that these Sentinels were running on a legacy "Search and Destroy" sub-routine—powerful, but linear. As two Sentinels converged on him, their palms glowing, Peter waited until the very last millisecond. He backflipped through the air, sticking to the chest of the third Sentinel.
The crossfire hit home. The two pursuing Sentinels blasted their comrade square in the power core. As the giant tumbled, Peter used the explosion as a springboard, webbing the remaining two together in a tangled mess of high-tensile cables.
"Calculated risk, 100% success," Peter muttered, diving into the hole the falling Sentinel had punched into the bunker's roof.
Inside the facility, the environment shifted from sun-scorched rock to sterile, fluorescent-lit corridors of reinforced steel.
Tucked into the utility pockets of Peter's belt and Felicia's hip-holster were the obsidian-black phones Ethan had provided. As they crossed the threshold of the bunker's internal firewall, the devices vibrated with a frequency too high for human ears to detect.
Deep within the encrypted architecture of the phones, a dormant sub-routine labeled 'G-LEASH' flickered to life. N.E.A.R. didn't need Ethan's fingers on a keyboard to act. It used the phones as a mobile bridge, a Trojan horse carried willingly into the heart of the enemy's kingdom. The moment Felicia leaned against a wall to catch her breath, the phone in her holster established a handshake with the local network. Within three seconds, N.E.A.R. had bypassed the 128-bit encryption of the base's security hub.
Files began to flow. Schematics for the Sentinels and files for the "Mannite" project, biological records of the captive children, and—most importantly—the developmental logs for a new synthetic-organic hybrid Sentinel began uploading to Ethan's private server in Long Island.
Neither Peter nor Felicia knew of this function.
"Emma, wait!" Felicia hissed.
They had reached a hallway that looked like a corridor of death. Six automated turrets were recessed into the ceiling, their motion-tracking lasers weaving a lethal web across the floor. Beyond them lay a series of high-frequency laser grids that vibrated with enough heat to slice through titanium.
Emma didn't even break her stride. In her diamond form, the turret fire pinged off her skin like harmless hailstones. The lasers hit her chest and refracted, splashing uselessly against the walls. She walked through the carnage as if she were strolling through a garden.
Felicia stood at the edge of the kill zone, her heart hammering against her ribs. She was the world's greatest thief, but she was still human. She calculated the timing of the turrets, the oscillation of the lasers. She dove, rolling under the first sweep, her fingers grazing the floor as a bullet whistled past her ear. She was three-quarters of the way through, her lungs burning, her vision blurring from the sheer adrenaline, when a turret locked onto her landing spot.
'I'm too slow,' she thought, a cold spike of fear hitting her gut.
Then, a familiar weight caught her around the waist.
Peter pulled her into his chest, his momentum carrying them both through the final laser grid. He moved with a casual grace that made her struggle look pathetic. He landed them softly beside Emma, who had already reverted to her human form, looking perfectly composed.
"You okay, Felicia?" Peter asked, his voice full of genuine concern. "You looked like you were having a hard time back there. That's not like you."
Felicia stepped out of his arms, her face flushing with a mixture of exertion and humiliation. She thought of Ethan's voice—smooth, melodic, and cruel—whispering to her in the SUV.
'Ask yourself during the trip if you're going there to help him carry the weight... or if you're just one more thing he has to carry. I don't think I could stand such a thing if I were you.'
"I'm fine, Peter," she snapped, her voice sharper than she intended. She adjusted her gloves, refusing to look him in the eye. Every time he saved her, she felt Ethan's words echo in her mind. When things got dangerous, she wasn't an equal; she was a liability. She was basically the same as Mary Jane in this mission. She was basically the same as a civilian playing at being superpowered.
Emma ignored the domestic tension. She closed her eyes, her hand going to her temple. "Be quiet," she commanded. "Someone is... reaching out."
The psychic connection didn't feel like a knock on a door. It felt like a flood.
Emma's mind was suddenly pulled away. She wasn't seeing through her own eyes anymore. She was seeing through the eyes of Nina.
The perspective was distorted, filtered through the glass of a stasis tube. Nina wasn't just a prisoner; she was an experiment. Emma saw the "Mannites"—five other children, their bodies suspended in a row of individual tubes.
But it was the center of the room that made Emma's blood run cold.
A massive, pulsating mass of synthetic flesh and circuit-interwoven bone hung from the ceiling. It looked similar in shape to a human-sized Sentinel, but it was breathing. Tubes ran from the children's stasis pods directly into the core of this biological machine, siphoning their unique genetic markers—Nina's reality-warping, the other children's powers—to feed the "Hybrid."
"They're hurting us," Nina's voice echoed in Emma's mind. It wasn't a cry; it was a cold statement of fact. "They want to take us apart and make something with the pieces. They think that if they make the machine out of us, the machine won't have to learn how to hate. It will just know."
The vision shifted. Emma saw the base's self-destruct sequence, the guards' patrol routes, and the "Kill Switch" for the stasis pods. Nina wasn't asking for a rescue; she was providing a tactical map.
Emma snapped back to reality, her gasp echoing in the corridor. She looked at Peter and Felicia, her eyes wide with a rare flash of genuine horror.
"This is bad," Emma whispered. "They're harvesting from the kids to build something... organic."
"Then we end it," Peter said, his voice dropping into that low, dangerous register he used when he stopped being a jokester and started being a hero. "Emma, lead the way. Felicia, stay behind me."
Felicia flinched at the command. 'Stay behind me,' as they moved deeper into the facility, the phones in their pockets continued their silent work. N.E.A.R. was currently downloading the exact genetic sequence of the Hybrid Sentinel. It was recording the failure rates of the Mannite integration and the chemical composition of the nutrient bath used to keep the children alive.
Back in Long Island, Ethan Kane sat in his bedroom, his laptop screen reflecting in his calm, dark eyes. He watched the data bars fill up with green light. He saw the schematics for the organic Sentinel—a weapon that could adapt to any mutant power in real-time.
"Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Felicia," Ethan whispered to the empty room. "You're doing a wonderful job as always."
Ethan looked at the clock. He would head over to the Massachusetts Academy with his parents in two days. His mother was on board, but his father required a little convincing to accept it.
He leaned back, a secret, satisfied smile spreading across his face, "Surprising what you can pick up here and there."