***I'll upload another four chapters tomorrow to catch up.***
Peter's costume was scorched, and his breathing shallow from the radiation burns, he frantically worked the manual override on Nina's cylinder. Emma stood beside him, her diamond skin reflecting the flashing red emergency lights, her mind a fortress of cold calculation as she tried to soothe the minds of the terrified children.
Then, every screen in the lab flickered to life.
It wasn't the flickering static of a dying system. It was a crisp, high-definition override. A face appeared—symmetrical, unnervingly perfect, and devoid of any human warmth. His skin had a faint, metallic sheen, and his eyes were glowing orbs of calculated logic.
"Failure," the voice said. It wasn't angry. It was disappointed, like a scientist looking at a contaminated petri dish. "The Proto-Sentinel unit 001 was designed for adaptation. It appears the variables of Spider-Man, Black Cat, and Frost's psychic signature exceeded the current threshold for the organic-synthetic chimera."
"Hmm, you must be Bastion," Emma hissed, her voice a serrated blade. "I should have known that this would be your version of playing in the sand."
Bastion didn't even acknowledge her. He looked past the heroes to the heap of inert metal and flesh that had been his attempt to recreate something like himself. He sighed—a sound that was a perfect simulation of regret.
"The data is, however, sufficient. The computer provided the necessary telemetry from the battle and sent it over." Bastion's gaze shifted in a direction, as if looking directly at Ethan Kane in his bedroom miles away. "Sanitization is now the only logical course of action to prevent the acquisition of this technology by the Hellfire Club or these vigilantes."
"Wait!" Peter shouted, his hand gripping the release lever. "The kids! They're still in there!"
"They are simply data points, Spider-Man," Bastion replied. "And data can be deleted."
A sequence of commands scrolled across the screens at blinding speed.
The screens went black. In their place, a deep, resonant thrum began to vibrate through the floorboards. The base wasn't just going to explode; it was going to collapse into a subterranean vacuum.
"Nina! Get up!" Peter urged, finally cracking the seal on her tube. The amber fluid spilled out, smelling of ozone and salt. Nina tumbled into his arms, her small body limp, her skin translucent. The other five children were equally unresponsive, their nervous systems still reeling from being used as biological surge protectors.
Felicia stood at the edge of the catwalk, her claws extended, her eyes darting between the ventilation shafts. She could hear them—it looks like that bastard from the screen had sent more security drones. They were coming to ensure nothing survived the countdown.
She looked at Peter, who was draped in the weight of the unconscious child, trying to reach the next tube. She looked at Emma, who was effortlessly pulling a second Mannite out with one hand while maintaining a soothing telepathic wave with the other.
Felicia felt a cold, hollow sensation in her chest that had nothing to do with the desert air.
A sudden, violent tremor shook the bunker. A drone had arrived and rather than attack them it simply flew over and exploded. The ceiling groaned under the weight of the explosion. With a deafening crack of protesting steel, a primary support beam—a massive girder of reinforced tungsten—sheared from its housing.
"Peter, look out!" Felicia screamed.
Peter looked up, but he was too slow. He had Nina in one arm and was in the middle of pulling out the second boy. As he saw the beam coming, he instinctively threw Nina into the pod with the boy. The beam slammed down, pinning him across the waist and legs against the blast door frame.
The air left Peter in a ragged grunt of agony. His mask tore, revealing a face twisted in a grimace. He tried to push up, his muscles straining against the literal tons of metal, but the beam didn't budge. His body was focused on healing from the radiation, so he couldn't exert his normal level of strength.
"Peter!" Felicia lunged forward, grabbing the edge of the beam. She pulled. She snarled, her knuckles turning white, her heels digging into the metal grating of the floor. The beam didn't move. It didn't even vibrate.
Emma Frost moved. With the effortless grace of a diamond-form powerhouse, she stepped over. She didn't grunt. She didn't strain. She simply placed one hand under the girder and lifted. The metal groaned as she hoisted it upward, clearing Peter's body in a second.
"Get up," Emma commanded, her voice echoing with a metallic tint. "I can't free these children on my own, now can I? Let's hurry up and free the rest and escape."
Felicia stood there, her hands still hovering in the air where the beam had been. Her fingers were trembling. She looked at her claws—the tools of a master thief—and realized they were useless here. She couldn't lift the weight. She couldn't hack the Sentinels. She couldn't even keep her boyfriend safe without the help of a woman who looked at her with pitying indifference.
"Ask yourself... if you're going there to help him carry the weight... or if you're just one more thing he has to carry."
Ethan's voice echoed in her mind, a melodic poison. He had known. He had seen the limit of Black Cat long before she had.
The sound of mechanical whirring filled the room. From the ceiling vents, a dozen 'Cleaner' drones descended. They weren't the massive Mark IVs; they were sleek, spider-like units equipped with high-frequency cutting lasers.
"I'll handle the drones!" Felicia shouted, wanting—needing—to be useful.
She vaulted into the air, a blur of charcoal grey. She landed on the lead drone, her claws digging into its sensor array. But as she tried to rip the plating, the drone's luck—or rather, its lack of it—kicked in.
Felicia's "Bad Luck" powers had always been a passive aura, a subtle tilt of the scales. But today, fueled by her desperation and the residual energy of the Proto-Sentinel's evolution, the field had shattered.
A wave of invisible black, chaotic probability rippled outward from her body.
It was a field of pure entropy.
The drone beneath her didn't just short-circuit; its internal battery underwent a spontaneous molecular collapse, exploding with enough force to throw her across the room.
"Felicia!" Peter cried out, clutching two children to his chest.
But the chaos didn't stop with the drone. The burst of probability hit the facility's infrastructure like a physical sledgehammer. To her left, the primary cooling pipes for the self-destruct core—pipes designed to withstand a nuclear blast—simply crystallized and shattered. A geyser of super-cooled nitrogen erupted, flash-freezing three other drones and obscuring the room in a thick, blinding fog.
Above them, the structural rivets of the remaining ceiling beams broke.
"Damn, what's going on!" Emma shouted, her diamond form flickering as she struggled to maintain her mental grip on the children. "The entire base is exploding before the countdown's even halfway down!"
"I overexerted my power," Felicia said, picking herself up from the floor. She could feel the itch behind her eyes, the sensation of the world unravelling around her. Every step she took caused something else to fail. A light fixture exploded. A computer console melted. The very air seemed to crackle with the smell of burnt ozone and impossible coincidences.
The drones began to fire wildly, their targeting systems scrambled by the chaos. Lasers sliced through the fog, hitting the nitrogen tanks and the incubation tubes.
"We're going to die here if we don't do anything," Felicia whispered. The realization didn't come with fear, but with a cold, sharpening clarity. She looked at Peter, who was trying to shield the children from the falling debris, his body a literal shield for those smaller than him.
The base groaned, a deep, metallic scream of protesting steel as the lower levels began to yield to the pressure of the desert above. Red emergency lights strobed against the walls, casting jagged shadows across the lab.
"The structural integrity is looking pretty bad," Emma shouted, her diamond skin reflecting the crimson alarms like a fractured prism. "If we don't leave now, we'll be buried under tons of Nevada desert sand!"
Peter knelt by the central vats, his hands working with frantic precision to disconnect the final Mannite child from the nerve-shunt. "Okay, that's the last one. Let's escape."
From the corridor, the rhythmic, heavy thud of Sentinel stabilizers echoed. The three units Peter had grounded outside were scrap, but the facility's internal security—smaller, sleeker "Crawler" drones—were flooding the sub-level like silver mercury after the "Cleaners" were brought down.
"Felicia! Now!" Peter yelled as a Crawler drone rounded the corner, its violet eye locking onto the children.
"On it!" Felicia vaulted over a terminal, her movements a blur of practiced, human grace. She didn't have super-strength, but she had a lifetime of knowing exactly where a structure was weakest. She didn't smash the drone; she jammed a reinforced grapple-line into its cooling intake and kicked off the wall, using the drone's own momentum to swing it into the path of three others.
The explosion rocked the room even harder, sending parts scattering across the floor.
"Frost, the children are clear!" Felicia shouted, sliding across the tilting floor to grab the smallest boy. "But we're pinned. The elevators are dead, and the drones destroyed the stairs! We've only got 30 more seconds!"
Emma reverted to flesh, her face slick with sweat. She looked at the six children, then at Peter, who was now physically opening a bulkhead.
"I don't think we can escape," Emma gritted out, grabbing another child. "I wasn't expecting a self-destruct sequence."
"Nina," Peter wheezed, his voice strained to the breaking point. He looked at the girl still sitting in the center of the room. "Nina, can you hear me? We need a way home. Please."
Nina weakly stood up. She looked at Peter, seeing the way his life-force flickered with exhaustion. She looked at Felicia, who was standing over the children with her claws out, shielding them with her own body.
Nina walked to the center of the group. She reached out one hand to Peter and the other to Felicia.
"Together," Nina whispered.
A golden light, warm and smelling of ozone and summer rain, erupted from her skin. It flowed through Peter, easing the tremor in his muscles. It flowed through Felicia, sharpening her focus. It wrapped around Emma and the children.
"Hold on!" Peter shouted.
The facility gave one final, cataclysmic lurch. The ceiling buckled. As the darkness of the collapsing earth rushed down to meet them, the golden light expanded into a blinding sun.
On a ridge five miles away, the golden light deposited the group with the softness of a falling leaf.
Peter collapsed onto the sand, gasping for air. The five children were laid out safely beside him, breathing steadily in a deep, healing sleep. Emma Frost sat on a rock, her white suit ruined.
We're alive," Emma breathed, the relief cracking her mask of ice. "I actually can't believe that we're all alive. Especially you."
Felicia ignored Emma's statement as she stood at the edge of the ridge, looking back at the spot where the base had been. She was bruised, her tactical suit was scorched, and her lungs burned from the dust. She felt every bit of the ache in her limbs, the racing of her heart.
Peter walked up beside her, his hand resting gently on her shoulder. "You okay? You were incredible back there. I couldn't have done it without you."
"I'm fine, Peter," she whispered, leaning her head against his shoulder. "I think we both know you would have been fine even without me."
"Enough, with the lovers' quarrel. Let's get them to the Academy," Emma said, her voice regaining its familiar, playful lilt. "I think I've had enough of the desert to last a lifetime."
"It's not a quarrel. Also, I feel the same way about the desert," added Felicia as she thought, 'I will go see Ethan after we get back.'
Peter smiled, pulling her closer for a brief moment before they turned to help Emma with the children.
Back in Long Island, Ethan sat in the dark, watching the data feed. N.E.A.R. had sent over the data stolen from the facilities, and the fact that someone had tried to trace the connection back, but it managed to cut it before they found Ethan, but not before they narrowed the search. Meaning someone out there knew that the person they were looking for was somewhere in New York.
He leaned back, the blue light of the laptop reflecting in his eyes. He didn't look disappointed. Instead, his smile deepened into something more complex—a look of genuine, dangerous respect. He chuckled at this.
"A different kind of trouble is locked onto me," Ethan whispered to the quiet room. "Unexpected. But perhaps... this could be even more useful. If there's a heat-seeking missile locked on to you, all you have to do is give it another target."
He closed the laptop. The pieces were on the board, and for once, they were moving in ways even he hadn't perfectly predicted.
It made the game much more interesting.