"Haaah..."
At the sight of that unmistakable optic blast, Fenris closed his eyes and let out a long, heavy breath.
"Cyclops."
After a long moment, he turned around with Ryan still in hand. A man and a woman in black leather suits had appeared silently inside the main building at some point.
Behind them, a bald old man in a wheelchair was quietly watching Fenris.
"So that explains it. I was wondering who could so easily destroy a building like this."
Fenris's gaze swept across the three of them one by one.
The X-Men.
Now that they were here, there was no need to ask where the mutants had gone.
With Cyclops there to keep them in check, it would have been easy to suppress the riot caused by those mutants whose powers were not especially strong.
As for where the remaining soldiers and researchers had gone...
Looking at the base in its current wrecked state, the answer was obvious.
Ordinary people with no real ability to fight back, along with soldiers already terrified out of their minds by Fenris, meeting a group of enraged mutants - the outcome hardly needed explaining.
Once he pieced together what had just happened, Fenris's eyes shifted slightly.
"Doctor, looks like your saviors are here."
He glanced at Ryan, whose eyes had lit up the moment he saw the three of them and who had already started struggling wildly. After a brief pause, Fenris suddenly clenched his right hand and smashed Ryan, along with his entire body, straight into the thick wall beside him.
Boom!
After the thunderous impact, the doctor was left folded and jammed into the wall.
The crisp crack of breaking bones sounded especially sharp in the empty building. As the sudden loss of feeling in his lower body gave way to overwhelming pain, Ryan's head lolled to the side and he passed out on the spot.
"Too bad. Looks like your saviors can't save you after all."
Fenris curled his lip, then looked back at the newcomers.
"You..."
Fenris had moved far too quickly. Too quickly for Cyclops to stop him, let alone for Ororo, whose powers needed at least a moment to activate.
Seeing how ruthlessly brutal Fenris was, Ororo's eyes widened. Thunder rumbled, and dark storm clouds quickly rolled across the sky overhead.
No matter how good Scott's temper usually was, even he found it hard to stomach Fenris's contemptuous attitude. His right hand moved to his ruby-quartz glasses as well.
The atmosphere instantly turned razor-sharp.
Fenris appeared to be standing there casually, but every muscle in his body had already tightened in silence.
A fighter against two casters. The advantage is mine.
"All right. Stop."
Charles drove his wheelchair forward. His calm voice made Scott and Ororo both ease out of their combat stances.
"Don't start trouble with me."
Fenris had not expected to run into the X-Men this soon. Expressionless, he tossed out that line, then yanked Ryan back out of the wall and headed deeper underground, one heavy step at a time, toward the depths fifty meters below.
"Professor!"
As Fenris's back slowly disappeared from sight, Scott whipped around, baffled. "Why didn't you stop him?"
"Did you see how bloody and cruel his methods are?"
Scott pointed angrily at the blackened bloodstains and corpses scattered everywhere. "A person like that - are we supposed to bring him back and reform him too?"
The Professor did not answer immediately. Instead, he turned to Ororo.
"Ororo, do you think the same?"
"No." Ororo froze for a moment, then hesitated. "He... probably has his reasons."
After hearing that, the Professor only smiled faintly without comment.
"Scott, if you want to become a qualified leader, you can never act on impulse, and you can never look at things from only one side."
"If you have not lived through what he lived through, then you have no right to tell him he should be kind."
"Among the mutants we just rescued, the youngest was only five, and the oldest was no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven. They tore this base apart. Why don't you think they were cruel?" the Professor asked.
"That's because they..." Scott stopped halfway through, then suddenly looked up.
He understood what the Professor was trying to say.
"In those people's memories, I saw that child's past. He may be stronger than either you or Ororo."
The Professor's voice was gentle. "Do not stand afterward in God's position and condemn the person involved. It serves no purpose, and it is not compassion."
"I want to bring him back so he does not lose faith in humanity completely and one day become someone as extreme as Erik. Saving people, not destroying them, is why I founded the X-Men in the first place."
"..."
The Professor's words left Scott silent on the spot.
He had always hated evil. That was one of his strengths, but it also made him more prone to falling into rigid extremes.
"I understand... Professor. I shouldn't have judged him so casually before I knew the full story. I'll apologize to him later."
After a long silence, Scott finally raised his head and spoke slowly.
"Good."
Professor X nodded, then closed his eyes. "There's an extremely high concentration of radiation down there. We'll wait up here for that child."
In the next moment, the scene from Ryan's point of view was transmitted clearly into both of their minds.
Bang!
Slamming hard onto the alloy floor, Ryan finally regained a hazy sense of consciousness amid the biting cold and pain.
"This is... outside the lab..."
"My legs, my legs! I can't feel my legs!"
As sensation gradually returned, the terrible emptiness in his lower body twisted his face in panic, and he kept growling the words over and over.
"So what if you can't feel your legs?"
Fenris stood nearby, one foot planted on Ryan's chest. "Do you want to live?"
Fenris's question reignited hope in Ryan's eyes. He nodded frantically. "Yes, yes!"
"You want to live, huh."
Fenris drew the words out with a half-smile and pointed toward the reactor chamber door that he had forcibly torn open. "I'm not making things hard for you. Put on protective gear, go in there, and turn the valve three hundred times."
"If you come back out alive, I'll let you go. How about that?"
"Okay!"
Ryan agreed without a second of hesitation. Then he struggled into the lab, and a moment later came crawling back out, dragging a heavy radiation suit behind him.
"Hold it."
The instant he saw that anti-radiation suit, Fenris's face darkened. He casually tossed a suit jacket over Ryan's head. "Wear this."
"This..."
Ryan froze. "This counts as protective gear?"
"A burlap sack with a few lead plates sewn onto it would be better than this thing."
"It counts. Of course it counts." Fenris chuckled. "Didn't you guarantee on your personal honor that wearing this would absolutely let someone come out safely?"
At those words, the expression on Ryan's face instantly turned ashen.
Fenris had never intended to let him live, just as Ryan had never taken Fenris seriously before.
"Fenris, if you destroy Alkali, Stryker will never let you go."
Now fully aware of his fate, Ryan gave a miserable smile and quietly crawled through the doorway.
A short while later, Fenris stepped back out of the reactor chamber.
Of course, he had not really sent Ryan in there just to turn a valve. That would have been letting him off far too easily.
After lightly wiping the blood from his hands, Fenris turned back and cast a somewhat regretful glance at the reactor chamber.
"What a shame. Can't take it with me."
The Alkali genetic research facility was under military control. With such a severe accident and riot having broken out inside, there was no way the military would sit idle.
Even if their response was slow, they should have arrived by now.
Besides, Fenris was still not a true fully evolved Godzilla. At the moment, he stood only a little over two meters tall. Compared to a true hundred-meter titan, the gap between them was heaven and earth. He still could not truly ignore a modern military force.
If he wanted to keep getting bigger and stronger, he would need to keep finding radiation to absorb.
This place would have to wait until another chance came along for him to sneak back in.
When he returned to the surface and saw three pairs of eyes fixed directly on him, Fenris paused and instinctively shifted into a defensive stance.
"Don't be afraid, child. We mean you no harm."
Before Charles had even finished speaking, Scott pulled off his glove and strode straight toward Fenris.
"I'm sorry about the misunderstanding just now."
Even through the glasses, Fenris could clearly feel the man's sincerity.
"It's fine. Just don't stop me from slaughtering these animals."
Faced with Scott's open show of goodwill, Fenris merely nodded.
"We've already settled your companions in a place twenty kilometers away from the base. In a little while, we'll bring them all back to Xavier's School."
Ororo walked up as well, her tall figure impossible to ignore. "Xavier's School is a place the Professor created specifically for mutants. There, these children won't be oppressed or discriminated against. They'll be able to live normal lives."
"You have a great deal of potential. We'd like to invite you to join the school, and in the future become part of the X-Men."
Faced with their invitation, Fenris forced out a stiff smile and refused.
"My ability is a little unusual. I need to keep absorbing radiation to grow stronger. I'm guessing the school doesn't have a place like that."
There was one more thing Fenris did not say.
After lighting up Godzilla on the encyclopedia page, it was not only radiation he needed to keep absorbing to increase his strength. Those other Titan creatures would also require him to keep searching for ways to unlock them.
This path of growth, one that belonged to him alone, meant that even if he joined Xavier's School, he could never become an X-Man who was on standby at all times.
"Well..."
Fenris's words made Scott and Ororo look at each other.
What kind of normal person would build a reactor on school grounds?