This chapter has been brought to you and bought by Hugh Jass enjoy.
Morning crept through the eastern window, carrying the resolve of a February day bent on clarity.
Ethan lingered in the hush of waking, letting the night's memories find their shelves—not erased or diminished, simply placed. His anger cooled, becoming steadier and more purposeful. Raven's warmth anchored him. Nearby, Jean and Rogue's breathing shifted from deep sleep toward morning.
The dream stayed: flags adrift in space, a symbol fluttering in cosmic wind, Earth shrinking behind. He'd carried it since emerging from the mini sun yesterday; its persistence meant it mattered.
He filed it for later, turning his attention back to the quiet rhythm of morning in the room.
Raven's eyes met his with the unfiltered clarity she brought to waking, her mind swiftly scanning both the room and the man beside her in a single, practised glance.
"How are you?" she asked.
"Better," he told her. "Much better than two in the morning."
She studied him, weighing whether his 'better' was honest or just managed. Deciding it was real, she nodded. "Good,"
Rogue woke with purpose, reading Ethan's face as she did everything—straightforward and true. "You're going somewhere this morning,"
"I am," he said.
Jean came awake more slowly, the way she often did, but when her eyes opened, the awareness behind them was immediate and precise. She looked at him without asking the question, which meant she already knew, and then looked at the window and back at him.
"Stryker?" she asked.
He sat up, taking in the three faces he knew best, each bearing last night's weight in its own unmistakable way. This wasn't a briefing. This was sharing his intent with the people who mattered most.
"I need to finish this before I can train with any real focus," he said. "It's been sitting with me since I listened to her heartbeat moving away across the dark last night, and it won't move until I do something with it."
Raven held his gaze. "Then go do something about it," she said. Her dry tone carried a steady warmth, unwavering and sure.
Rogue met his eyes. "Come back before lunch," she said. "We'll be outside."
Jean regarded him with the calm acceptance of someone who had already made peace with who he was. "Be careful," "not because I think anything out there can touch you now, but because I want you to return with your mind as steady as it is now."
He looked at her. "I will," he said.
With resolve set, he left the room.
---
The world below blurred as he flew—Hudson Valley flashed by, the Catskills streaked in shadow, Connecticut, Long Island, and the distant sea disappearing in a single thought.
He extended his hearing as he flew.
He ignored alarms and gunfire—too obvious. Instead, he listened for language: the coded vocabulary of those managing mutants as threats, the subtle grammar of a hidden facility. Thousands of voices formed a layered tapestry beneath him; true listening meant patience, not force.
Words surfaced from the noise, like signals resolving from static.
Subject containment. A phrase that appeared in a context that wasn't medical. Then a name attached to a rank attached to a protocol he'd heard before, the specific operational language of the program that had built the Weapon X facility and had never fully closed.
He descended slightly, adjusting his bearing northeast.
Twenty minutes later, the base appeared—a compound mimicking a military installation like a costume mimics a face: convincing from afar, transparent up close. From three thousand feet, with X-ray vision and the ability to hear heartbeats through concrete, it was an open book.
He mapped it.
Personnel count: thirty-seven. Four with the specific bioelectric signatures of mutant-inhibitor technology on their persons. The interior layout resolved floor by floor — the administrative sections, the laboratory space that had been continuing Weapon X's research at a smaller scale, the communications centre, and in the building's northern section, set apart from everything else, a room where a single heartbeat occupied the particular calm of someone who believed themselves protected.
Stryker's.
Ethan hovered in the cold February air, cataloguing the facts with his usual precision: who was present, why they were here, and the culpability each carried. No one here was incidental. Everyone had chosen to be part of an operation that abducted children from their school, perpetuated Weapon X's legacy, and took Raven.
He held that fact clearly and without drama.
Then he descended.
---
The work proceeded methodically, efficiently, stripped of excess. He cleared the compound section by section, moving inward. For the thirty-six who were not Stryker, the morning ended in ways none had foreseen.
He found Stryker in the northern room.
Stryker sat in his wheelchair, destined to use it for what little time remained. He met Ethan's gaze, composed, convinced of his righteousness. That composure was real, but it wouldn't alter the outcome.
Stryker reached for something on the table beside him — Ethan did not wait to find out what it was.
The last thing Stryker did was begin a sentence that would have been an appeal to some framework of national security, human protection, or necessary sacrifice. The sentence did not finish.
Ethan recalled Raven's heartbeat fading into the night, and felt only certainty—what happened next felt entirely right.
He left the base behind him, the clarity that began at dawn growing more pronounced with each mile back toward the mansion—the purpose of the morning's journey leading him unbroken to what came next.
---
By late morning, the mansion's back grounds felt alive, as if the resolve that began with sunlight had drawn everyone outside. Raven, Jean, Rogue, and Ilyana were already there—Raven intent on the sling ring, Jean guiding stones with telekinesis, Rogue and Ilyana deep in a technical exchange about stepping discs, their conversation genuine and unforced.
They looked at him when he landed.
He looked at them.
Each face registered the same silent assessment and reached the same conclusion. No one asked about the base or its occupant; the answer was clear in the way Ethan stood, his presence changed from when he'd left that morning.
Raven looked at him for one moment longer than the others, and what passed between them was wordless and complete.
"Training?" he asked.
"We've been waiting," Rogue responded.
---
The session felt truly collaborative—not a show, not a test, but four people exploring how their powers intertwined and amplified each other.
Ethan started with Raven.
"The portals. Have you tried reaching for Ilyana's mechanism yet?"
Raven looked at the sling ring on her hand and then at Ilyana. "I've been watching it," she said. "The dimensional access principle is different from what the ring works toward, but there's a conceptual overlap that I think is worth exploring." She paused. "I haven't tried to copy it yet because I wanted to understand the mechanism more thoroughly before attempting."
Ilyana, from the group's edge, looked up from where she'd been following the conversation with the cataloguing attention she brought to discussions about her own abilities. "I'm not certain it can be copied the conventional way," she said. "The stepping disc isn't purely mutant in origin — it routes through Limbo, and Limbo is a dimensional construct that has a relationship with my soul specifically. A copy of the mutant ability might not have access to the same destination."
Raven considered this with the focused interest she brought to genuinely difficult problems. "So copying the mechanism might give me a portal to somewhere, but not necessarily to Limbo."
"Possibly to nowhere," Ilyana said. "Or to a different dimensional corridor entirely. I haven't thought carefully about what a copy of my ability would actually do, because no one has ever copied it."
"That's something to consider before anyone tries," Jean said from nearby, listening while continuing her precision work. "Opening a portal without knowing the destination isn't a trivial risk."
"Agreed," Ethan said. He looked at Raven. "The sling ring is the cleaner priority. You said you're close."
"The direction is there," Raven said, her voice steady with the confidence of someone sensing what's just out of reach. "The pressure's been building for weeks. I'm working on the opening." She rolled the ring between her fingers. "It's like pressing against a membrane you can feel but not see. I understand the mechanism. The execution is almost here."
"Then let's work on something that might help," he said. "Run it alongside the telekinesis-and-flight combination you've been developing. Two things simultaneously have been expanding your range for copied powers — it might do something for the mechanism you're reaching for."
Raven looked at him with the expression she used when he'd said something she found worth trying. "That's an interesting instinct,"
"Try it, if you will", he said.
He turned to Jean.
She was watching him with the dry amusement that had become more present in her expression over the past months — the version of Jean that had come through what Xavier's blocks had been keeping compressed, warmer and more willing to let things show. "Before you tell me what you think I should work on," she said, "I want you to know I've been thinking about the precision problem too."
"And?" he said.
"The challenge at the upper scale isn't force generation," she said. "It's resolution. At the force levels I can produce now, a coarse adjustment can move geological features. What I need is to be able to operate at the fine end of the scale without dropping into the coarse end — the whole range available without the transition between them being abrupt." She levitated three of the stones at very different distances and held them precisely stationary. "I've been working on that. But working with you would push the tolerance requirements higher than I can push them alone."
"Then work against me," he said. "Hold something that I'm actively trying to move. The resistance will make the precision harder."
Jean looked at the stone nearest to him — a substantial piece of fieldstone, maybe forty kilograms — and raised it between them at shoulder height. "Move it," she said.
He pushed against it with the force that would have moved a small mountain easily.
The stone did not move.
Jean's expression took on the concentrated look of someone who had found the exercise immediately useful.
"Good," he said, pushing harder.
The stone trembled.
"There," she said, and held it.
He pushed harder still, and the stone held at a cost he could read in her face — not strain exactly, but the particular effort of someone working at their actual edge rather than well within it. "That's the range," he said. "Stay there."
"Working on it," she said, through the concentration.
He turned slightly to check on Rogue, who was running the approach-and-positioning exercise on her own — working through a scenario in which a high-value target was mobile and shielded, developing instincts for how to close the distance and establish contact when every conventional route was covered.
She moved with Apocalypse's strength and the sharp focus of someone who had studied the tactical challenge. Her approach vectors were smarter than yesterday—more patient, more indirect, using the environment's cover instead of forcing her way through.
"Better," he called to her.
She glanced at him with the expression of someone who already knew it was better and did not require the observation, but was not going to say so. "I know," she said. "I'm working on the window. The contact is the easy part — finding the moment when contact is possible without tipping the approach is the hard one."
"The moment usually opens when the opponent is committed to something else," he said. "Their attention goes somewhere — a more visible threat, a higher-priority target. That's when you close."
"Which means I need a coordination framework with the rest of you," she said. "So the opening gets created rather than just waiting for it."
"Exactly,"
She dove back into the exercise, her focus sharpened by the new insight.
From the edge of the group, Ilyana absorbed everything—the flow of movement, the trust in shared assessments, the way Ethan trained alongside them instead of apart.
He looked at her. "You're thinking of something," he said.
"I'm thinking several things," she said, which was always true but was her way of saying, "yes, I'll tell you one of them." "The approach problem for Rogue — if I were involved in a coordinated engagement, I could use the portals to create approaches that don't exist conventionally. Open a disc behind a target's position, place Rogue on the other side of it, and close it the moment she's through. The target never sees the approach because the approach didn't go through the physical space they were watching."
Rogue stopped her exercise and looked at Ilyana.
Ilyana looked back with the expression of someone who had offered something and was waiting to see if it was wanted.
"That," Rogue said, "is worth training in."
Ilyana gave the small nod that was her version of satisfaction.
---
The afternoon's training wound down, giving way to the easy comfort of people who had earned their rest. February's light softened from icy white to gentle gold, and they drifted toward the kitchen with the unhurried ease of those ready for warmth and company.
Nightcrawler had spent most of the day in the kitchen—the kind of day that ended with something delicious. He looked up from his pot as they entered, wearing the satisfied look of someone who had timed things perfectly.
"I have been making something," he announced, "because I believed training would produce hungry people, and I was correct in this belief, as I am correct in most beliefs. Sit down."
"You've been cooking all day?" Jean asked.
"I've been cooking all afternoon," he said. "The morning I spent in the library. There is a distinction."
The food, crafted with care, was excellent. Conversation flowed easily, touching on everything but training or raids or Stryker—just the talk of people who knew each other well enough to be effortlessly interesting. It carried them from kitchen to sitting room, long past when anyone meant to stop.
At one point, Ilyana, who had been listening to a debate between Nightcrawler and Bobby about the relative difficulty of using ice to travel mid-battle, looked across the room at Ethan with the expression she used when she'd arrived at something she hadn't expected to arrive at.
He raised an eyebrow.
She looked away, which was the closest she came to an admission that anything had registered emotionally.
He let it go.
---
Later, in the room, the four of them settled into the arrangement that had become second nature over weeks together.
Ilyana was in her own room. The rest of the mansion was at its nighttime register.
What passed between the four as night fell needs no further detail—only that it was the right ending for this day, that each was fully present, and that the February darkness outside held the mansion, the lake, and the mini sun's steady, patient light.
The February night gathered all it contained, and tomorrow was already approaching.