While Warrior Three and Lady Sif were in New Mexico getting thrown around the street by the Destroyer, Colonel William Stryker stood in his favourite lab and watched the body on his lucky slab begin to stir.
The eyelids fluttered first.
Then the head moved.
Then the false Lucius on the slab opened his eyes and looked at him with exactly the kind of slow, drugged confusion Stryker had wanted to see since the moment he learned of this freak.
The colonel smiled.
He had prepared words for this. Not all at once. Not in a neat speech written on paper like some politician rehearsing applause. Stryker preferred the older form of theatre, the kind built on certainty and captivity. He walked closer to the slab with his hands behind his back and his gaze fixed on the prisoner he believed finally belonged to him.
"You've caused a great deal of trouble for a mutant who should have learned his place the first time he was handled by men better than him."
The illusion on the slab said nothing.
That pleased him too.
Stryker went on with growing heat because men like him only needed a listener to become prophets in their own heads.
"You things always make the same mistake. You think power changes the order of the world. It doesn't. It never has. Human beings built civilisation. Human beings forged nations, armies, industry, medicine, and law. Mutants crawl out of the same filth and imagine a random twist in the blood makes them the next step. It doesn't make you the future. It makes you useful, dangerous, diseased, or dead depending on what decent men decide to do with you."
He stopped beside the slab and leaned down slightly, his voice thinning with disgust.
"I've spent my whole life proving that. Mutants do not inherit the earth. They do not replace mankind. They serve, they break, or they disappear."
The soldiers at the walls kept still. Jason and Deathstrike were not there. Stryker had wanted this moment first for himself, just him and the prize and the sweet, private satisfaction of speaking divine truth into a face he believed could no longer answer back.
Lucius, invisible near the upper rail of the lab and listening with his arms folded, allowed the man another minute on principle. There was educational value in hearing how much stupidity could fit inside one skull before it started leaking out of the ears.
Stryker's voice grew uglier.
"You'll learn obedience. That is the beauty of this place. Everything learns obedience here in the end. Your potions, your powers, your freak blood, all of it will be turned into service. You'll make what you're told to make. You'll bleed when you're told to bleed. You'll be owned and be useful."
He smiled at the illusion like a priest blessing meat.
"And when the lesson takes, you'll be a very productive little bitch."
That was enough.
Lucius sighed once and reached into the largest soldier standing behind the colonel.
The man moved instantly under telepathic command, planted his boot, and kicked Stryker between the legs with all the strength he could put into the blow.
The sound that came out of the colonel belonged to a much smaller and frailer species than the one that had just been preaching supremacy.
His whole body folded. Hands shot down too late. Knees buckled. The speech died in his throat and returned as a thin, strangled whimper that still, hilariously, tried to form the word bitch on its way out.
Lucius drifted down as Stryker collapsed sideways against the slab.
At the same moment, the illusion on the table broke apart like smoke giving up on the room.
The colonel saw both things at once, the vanishing prisoner and the real one descending out of the air, larger than before, broader, uglier in all the correct ways, and wearing amusement like a second skin.
For one exquisite instant, Stryker understood the situation properly.
Then Lucius began issuing orders.
"Strap him down."
The soldiers obeyed at once. Two grabbed the colonel by the arms. Another took the legs. Stryker tried to bark at them, but the pain in his groin broke the authority before it reached his mouth. They hauled him onto the same slab he had imagined as Lucius's future and pinned him there with practised efficiency.
Lucius had already started carving the runic geometry across the lab floor with telekinesis before the body even settled. Lines etched into metal and concrete in widening rings, each curve linked to the next with the same elegance. This was not the simple sacrificial array from before. This was the Array of Convergence, broader, meaner, designed for integration and inheritance.
He reached outward with telepathy and summoned Jason Stryker and Lady Deathstrike.
They arrived less than a minute later with the hollow, empty-eyed obedience he found deeply flattering in others.
Deathstrike came first, moving with a restraint that made the vacancy in her gaze even more offensive. Jason followed with quicker steps and a mouth already twitching with anticipation. He saw his father strapped to the slab, saw Lucius standing free in the middle of the room, saw the runes burning across the floor, and his eyes brightened in a way no decent son should ever manage.
Lucius pointed Deathstrike to the first circle.
"Stand there."
She stepped onto it without hesitation.
Then he turned to Jason and gestured towards the slab.
"You may play with him. Do not cause excessive damage. I am feeling generous, so you have five minutes."
Jason looked at his father.
Not the colonel now, not the commander, nor the man who had built whole rooms out of contempt and called it discipline. Just the old bastard who had never once looked at him with satisfaction.
His hand went to the instrument tray beside the slab. He picked up an orthopaedic mallet, weighed it once, and smiled with a softness that somehow made the whole room worse.
Stryker's face drained.
"Jason."
The boy raised the mallet.
Lucius stepped back, folded his hands behind him, and settled in to listen to the melodious beginning of a very bad half hour.
The first strike landed on the forearm.
Bone gave under the blow with a noise that would have ruined anyone's appetite. Stryker screamed. Jason hit him again. Then again. Knees next. Then the other arm. Lucius eventually gave up pretending five minutes mattered, because the performance had earned an extension and the facility was his in all ways that counted.
Twice, Stryker came close to dying before the lesson had ripened enough. Twice, Lucius leaned in, uncorked a Light Healing Potion, and poured enough down the bastard's throat to drag him back across the line purely so the next round could begin.
He did it with the casual patience of a man refilling a glass.
"Honestly," he told the slab after the second dose. "If you had shown this kind of determination in your parenting, the boy might have been less strange."
Stryker tried to answer. He only managed blood and something very close to prayer.
Jason's eyes had gone bright and unsteady by then. It was the first real joy he had felt in a very long time.
After a little, Lucius judged the music complete enough.
"Stop."
Jason froze with the mallet half raised.
Lucius pointed at the second circle.
"There."
Jason obeyed.
With a small flick of telekinesis, Stryker's broken body rose from the slab and floated to the third circle. He hung there for a second before Lucius lowered him carefully into place, because cracked merchandise still deserved alignment if it was about to become useful.
That left the fourth position empty.
Lucius turned to the soldiers with a smile so cheerful it should have counted as a warning.
He looked them over as if choosing from a restaurant menu, then began an almost reverent round of eeny meeny miney moe under his breath, letting the finger drift from one emotionless face to the next. "Catch a monkey by the toe." And his finger stopped on the large soldier who had helped redecorate Stryker's reproductive future earlier.
The man saluted, and Lucius brightened.
"Come, child."
He pointed to the fourth circle.
The soldier went silently.
"Nothing improved a ritual like a lucky winner who had no say in the draw."
That was the lovely thing about properly arranged mind control. Men always walked into sacrificial geometry with much better posture than they brought to battle.
Lucius stood at the centre of the array in an outrageously good mood.
The facility was his. Its files were his. Its soldiers were his. Deathstrike and Jason stood waiting. Stryker had been reduced to breath, damage, and future utility. And somewhere beyond the mountains, General Ross still believed this place answered to his chain of command.
Ross now held the last clean line into the existence of Alkali Lake.
Which meant Ross's time was coming fast.
That thought pleased Lucius so much that he almost started humming again.
Instead, he looked at the circles, the assets, the broken colonel, and the soldier, and thought that some days really did reward effort.
--
Far to the south, New Mexico had started losing buildings.
The Destroyer did not fight like a man or even like a machine built by men. It advanced with the impersonal certainty of a royal sentence finally delivered in metal. Heat built up in the faceplate. The beam hit, and walls ceased to be arguments. Cars turned into debris. The ground around it glowed with the kind of damage that made ordinary people understand very quickly that running was not cowardice. It was intelligence.
Lady Sif met it first with the best face in the field and the smallest shield in the county. Jaime Alexander had the sort of dark, severe beauty that looked almost unfair when placed inside bright Asgardian armour, and the film gods had further improved the image by giving her black hair, sharp eyes, and the confidence of a woman who expected the world to move around the shape of her decisions. Then some idiot had strapped a laughably small shield to her arm, as if a decorative dinner plate would make a meaningful difference against a walking furnace built by paranoid kings.
She fought anyway, which was to her credit and to the shield's embarrassment.
The Warriors Three followed with more courage than sense. Fandral moved like style had bullied its way into swordsmanship. Hogun fought with the grim sincerity of a man who trusted steel more than speeches. Volstagg hit like a cheerful avalanche and breathed like one, too. Against ordinary enemies, the four of them would have looked like a travelling demonstration of why Asgard kept winning wars. Against the Destroyer, they looked like very attractive delays.
Sif lunged in first and drove the pike clean, trying to exploit the opening while the others split the thing's attention. For one shining second, the hit mattered. Then the armour answered by not caring nearly enough. Fandral came from the side and was thrown off for the effort. Hogun struck with real force and bought another heartbeat. Volstagg committed his full weight and got paid back in pain. The Destroyer did not hurry through any of it. That was part of the insult. It simply dismantled them in sequence.
Thor, stripped of everything except muscles and bad judgment, grabbed Sif's little shield at one point and charged in with it as though stealing the smallest piece of equipment in the scene had somehow improved the mathematics. The thing looked ridiculous on him. It had already looked underqualified on Sif. On Thor, it became a travelling joke, an apology strapped to the arm of a man trying to stand between a king's executioner and the people he had decided were his now. Noble, stupid, and exactly the kind of gesture that made disaster lean in closer to watch.
The Destroyer answered all of them the same way.
Sif was thrown hard, and Fandral hit the ground in a sprawl his usual charm could not rescue. Hogun took the kind of punishment that made stubborn men quieter. Volstagg went down like a banquet table kicked over in a siege. By the time the dust settled again, the Warriors Three and Lady Sif had all had their arses handed to them by an obedient pile of uru metal that had not yet bothered to call the evening difficult.
And Thor was getting ready to be worthy.