Laura's feral charge was impossible for Wolverine to handle, and she punctured his heart and pulled her claws from the side, ripping through half of his chest in the process. Even his metal skeleton meant nothing in front of Laura's claws as she directly sliced through his ribs. She stabbed her other claw into Wolverine's face and twisted, making it impossible for him to say anything.
Instinctively, he was already trying to resist, but Laura was almost impossibly strong, making it impossible for him to even sit up under her weight. The moment he tried to move an arm or leg, she would simply cut off the limb and continue to cut and slash at his rapidly healing body. While his healing factor was quite pronounced, it meant nothing if he couldn't mount the slightest bit of resistance against Laura.
"Laura, stop..." Charles couldn't watch any longer as Wolverine kept getting cut up and healing repeatedly. Seeing her ignore his words, he mobilized his psychic powers and tried to lift her off of Wolverine.
"How about you not interfere in family matters, Professor?" Alex asked, blocking the man's psychokinesis with a force field and preventing him from affecting Laura. "Instead, I have some things to talk to you about."
Alex's effortless blocking of his psychokinesis and his generally calm, collected demeanor unnerved Charles. For someone who was used to always being in control of the situation and the people around him, dealing with someone like Alex was quite troubling. With an audible breath, he gave one last look of concern to Laura, as she hacked away at Wolverine, who didn't get a single chance to retaliate.
"Fine," Charles said. "She likely needs to let out the resentment in her heart. Please follow me."
"Charles..." Ororo looked at Wolverine with a worried expression.
"He'll be fine," Alex said before Charles could get a word in. "Laura knows where to hit to make sure there's no...irreparable damage."
As Charles rolled his wheelchair to the side, away from the gathered mutants, Alex followed.
"Now what would you like to talk about, Mr...Apex?"
"A lot of things, really," Alex said. "Whether or not you made a deal with Stark for this barrier. The specifically shielded Cerebro to prevent any leakage. The aura of two Infinity Stones coming from in there. Quite a few things, actually."
With each word Alex spoke, the old man's complexion grew paler as he gripped the armrest of his wheelchair.
"I don't know what you are talking about," he said.
"Don't play dumb with me," Alex said. "Let me give you my introduction first. I am Apex. The controller of the Gaia Federation, which is a collective of six planets. I have a seventh coming in, and this is going to be the eighth."
"You do not know the horrors this planet has birthed..."
"I do," Alex said. "I've already killed one of them and used its corpse to establish a new city-a massive eye, tentacles, quite an eldritch horror indeed. The one on this continent should be somewhere deeper into the Amazon, I believe. A treant-like creature, I believe."
Hearing the man in front of him casually describe two creatures that he'd only ever caught a glimpse of through Cerebro and faced a severe backlash in the process, Charles felt a creeping fear run down his spine.
"What are you here for?" He decided to be direct, having gauged that the man in front of him wasn't one for wasting time in a meaningless back-and-forth.
"At first, I was just here to help my feral wife vent her grievances," Alex said. "We'd probably have left once she beat up Wolverine and maybe a few others. But then I saw the barrier and compared it to the one in the Bastion... I have to say, they are both remarkably similar."
"I did what I had to do. His voice came out as a defeated whisper as he slumped into his chair.
"You sold out a little girl, not even an adult, to have her marrow extracted day by day? To let them treat her like a fucking animal?" Alex asked flatly. "What? Are you going to tell me that Logan's healing factor wasn't enough for Stark?"
"..." The old man remained silent for a few seconds, contemplating. "The others don't know... I hope you can let it stay that way."
"Charles Xavier, the patron saint of the greater good," Alex cursed. "Fine, they feel guilty already. I can leave them be. But you can't lead the mutants anymore."
"I can accept that..." He nodded. "I'm getting old anyhow."
"What about Eric?" Alex said. "Is he dead?"
"After losing Wanda and Pietro..." Charles shook his head.
Alex knew there was far more to it than what Charles said. For someone like Magneto to kick the bucket out of grief over losing his kids was impossible. But he didn't delve into it. All he wanted to know was if there was anyone else with seniority among the X-Men.
"Ororo it is then, I guess," he said. "Now... What's the deal with Cerebro? Why do I sense two Infinity Stones in there?"
"I'm afraid I cannot disclose anything about that, Mr. Apex, Charles said, shaking his head. "The reason I was willing to open dialogue with you in the first place is because of her. If you wish to stay here, you are welcome, but if you wish to pry into our private matters, I cannot acquiesce."
"Oh, you think you have a choice, Alex smiled. "How cute."
"I do not wish for us to come to blows, as fellow mutants, Apex," Charles dropped the mister. "But if you insist, I can assure you that you will regret it."
"Will I, now?" Alex asked, a provocative smile on his face. "Shall we put it to the test? How many of your precious X-Men will I take down before regretting it, I wonder?"
"You shall not have the chance to do so," Charles said, shaking his head. "Rogue."
Alex raised a brow at the man's words before someone tackled him at the waist, startling him for a moment. The force didn't affect him in the slightest, not even making him flinch, but what followed made him frown.
Alex immediately felt his Bioenergy being drained out of his soul, instantly losing more than twenty units as more followed. Looking down, it was a redhead with streaks of white in her hair who was tightly hugging his waist from the side, trying to push him, but to no avail. Instinctively, Alex backhanded her before a full second even passed, throwing the woman into the distance as her grip over him weakened.
Over a hundred units...gone in less than a tenth of a second. Fucking Rogue. I haven't fought any of her variants yet...
While a hundred units were no more than a pittance for the current Alex, who generated massive amounts of Bioenergy in the Gaia Penitentiary, it was still startling. After all, a hundred units equated to more than a million normal people, considering they provided roughly 0.0001 unit of Bioenergy when Alex directly devoured them. Even looking at
Looking at Rogue, Alex noticed that the Bioenergy she'd absorbed from him was the only reason she was still alive. After all, his backhand was instinctive and would, for all intents and purposes, blow her head to smithereens under normal circumstances.
He didn't have any time to consider as Iceman shot a literal cold beam at him, trying to freeze him. At the same time, Colossus tackled him in an attempt to throw him off his feet, only to fail miserably as Cyclops opened his visor and let his energy beams loose at him.
"Is this the best you've got, Professor?" Alex asked, casually smacking away Colossus after a few seconds and throwing the hunk of metal in the general direction of Rogue. "Tell me, how did you hide Rogue from my senses?"
"The same way I keep the thing deeper in the jungle from detecting us," Charles said. "If Ororo acts, I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep this place hidden from that thing."
"Are you threatening me?" Alex asked, an amused smile on his face.
Charles didn't answer as Alex felt two knives appear inside his thighs. Feeling the sense of stabbing pain course through his simulated human body, he smiled darkly and glanced back at the intangible. Shadowcat who had just stabbed him with intangible knives to break through his nigh-impenetrable skin.
"Kitten," Alex said. "I'm going to make you pay for that one later."
The knives disappeared from his thighs as the pierced skin healed, including Alex's clothing, making it seem as if he was never stabbed in the first place. Before she could make any other moves, Alex grabbed her by the throat, bypassing her intangibility by using a force field to coat his hand. She choked, her face turning blue as Alex raised her off her feet. The attacks of the other X-Men were useless against Alex, whether it was Iceman, Cyclops, Beast, or Colossus. Their attacks couldn't even scratch his clothes.
Helpless, Shadowcat was forced to cancel her intangibility as Alex's smile widened and he blocked her X-Gene.
"Good," he said as the others stopped their attacks to not accidentally hurt her. "I don't want to deal with you turning me intangible and sending me to the center of the Earth..." He said before tossing her in the same general direction as Rogue, who still hadn't recovered from his attack. After all, the only reason she was still alive was the massive amount of Bioenergy she'd absorbed from him.
Seeing him toss his hostage away, the others were about to continue acting against him. But Alex was faster, as he appeared behind Cyclops.
"Let's calm things down a bit, shall we?"
-x-X-x-
None of them, except for Charles, were even able to process the speed at which Alex had moved to appear behind Cyclops. The only reason Charles even sensed his movement was because his psychic powers were spread all around the place, tracking his path. Even then, the old man hadn't had the chance to warn anyone before Alex chopped at the back of Cyclops' neck and let the unconscious man drop to the ground.
After dealing with the most volatile superpower in the group, Alex's next targets directly delivered themselves to him. He grabbed Beast's fist as the blue furry tried to attack him and roughly pulled, tossing the mutant at Colossus, who had barely reached his position. He then tanked Iceman's attack and slammed his fist into the man's stomach as he doubled over, heaving from the intense pain and falling unconscious soon after. Finally, he turned his attention to Beast and Colossus, who had already recovered and were about to attack him. Shaking his head, he shot two bolts of lightning at them, immediately incapacitating them.
"Stand down!" A woman's voice captured Alex's attention as he turned his head.
Ororo had gone full Storm mode, her eyes glowing bright blue as lightning crackled along her fingertips. The sky had already turned grey, with dark clouds hovering all over the generally yellowed sky.
"Fools, the lot of you," Alex growled in annoyance before looking at Charles. "You'd rather die than let me find out whatever the fuck it is you're hiding with two Infinity Stones in there?"
"I'd rather sacrifice myself if necessary," Charles said, a solemn expression on his face.
"Yeah? What about your precious...students..." Alex's words trailed off as he noticed the absence of almost every single mutant he'd noticed in his surroundings before. "Motherfucking Charles Xavier... You're lucky I'm keeping you alive for Laura to deal with, or else you'd be dead by now..."
"There's still a chance," Charles said, sounding unbothered by Alex's threat. "I can ensure that thing doesn't detect us in the short term. The condition is for you to retreat. We will accept you and Laura as long as you do not pry into our matters."
As the old man said those things, Alex noticed a spatial fluctuation around him and immediately realized that Charles was trying to trick him again. The moment he noticed it, every single person whom he'd just dealt with had disappeared. The signature left by the Space Stone was too clear this time for Alex to remain in the dark about how everyone had disappeared previously.
"What are you suppressing in there, Charles?" Alex asked with a final tone. "I'm not playing anymore. You still haven't moved Cerebro, which likely means if you do, the thing you're holding in there will escape. What's in there?"
"I hoped it wouldn't come to this...' Charles said.
Immediately, a thick bolt of lightning, comparable to Thor's lightning, struck down and passed through the barrier, accurately striking Alex.
Alex didn't care in the slightest about the bolt and gave Ororo an annoyed look. Before she could do anything else, the blood inside her own body rebelled against her and her muscles locked into place. In an instant, her arms were restrained behind her back, and her legs were folded as she floated not by her own power, but because her blood was floating in the air. Finally, Alex limited the blood flowing to her brain to a minimum so that it continued performing the bare minimum functions and incapacitated her.
"You fucking people are the worst damned group of the X-Men I've ever encountered," Alex cursed at Charles, casually stowing Storm away into his (Inventory> before someone yanked her away with the Space Stone. "No wonder people like Erik and Emma Frost aren't in this group. At least they have some semblance of rationality..."
"Kidnapping Ororo is of no use, Apex," Charles said. "It's already awakened."
"Charles, I'm warning you. Don't fucking remove the suppression on the radiation emitted by the Infinity Stones. Someone far worse than me will show up if you do," Alex said. "I'll deal with the damn treant."
Just as Charles thought that he would leave, Alex split into two, with a black amorphous slime appearing beside him for a moment before turning into an identical clone that immediately took to the air, wrapped in Chaos Magic.
"Now then, how about you teach me to isolate the unique radiation that Infinity Stones emit?" Alex asked with a smile.
...
The clone that flew into the air easily passed through the barrier and flew even higher, getting a bird's-eye view above the rainforest. A significant distance from the mansion, almost in the center of the forest, Alex noticed some of the trees growing abnormally fast. Within seconds, the trees in that section of the forest, comprising an area of about a quarter of a square mile, had risen to more than double the height of the other trees and continued growing without showing any signs of slowing down..
As the trees continued rising, Alex noticed that the edges of the rainforest were shrinking rapidly, as if the trees and the swampy area all around were being pulled inward. In its wake, all that remained was more of the same cracked earth and endless wasteland that was the rest of the planet.
"Holy fuck... This thing is like a hive mind of trees...." Alex mumbled, noticing that the central trees weren't only growing in height, but were also growing wider, soon melding together into a single unit of tree. "This thing could give Yggdrasil a run for its money..."
Alex remained in the air and crossed his arms as the treant abomination slowly manifested into a massive tree that was as tall as a small mountain.
"Tempted by what I have, little tree?" Alex mumbled. He'd already ensured that the X-Men's sanctuary was completely hidden from the treant and made sure to capture its full attention by releasing the aura of all the bioenergy he possessed. To an abomination that wished to devour all life energy, his exposed Bioenergy was like the sun, making it impossible for it to pay attention to anything else.
Having noticed Alex and the endlessly vast aura of life emitted from the man, the treant seemed to have no patience as an endless onslaught of roots, branches, and vines shot up from the ground. The approaching vines were so dense that the green canopies of the trees momentarily disappeared in Alex's vision as the air around them distorted.
Alex was more than two miles up in the air and barely at the same level as the canopy of the mountain-like treant. Even then, the attacking branches and vines, which had breached the speed of sound, reached his position within mere seconds, generating countless sonic booms in their wake.
Before they could entangle Alex, however, a bolt of lightning, far stronger and more intense than the one Ororo summoned, struck his position, directly vaporizing most of the approaching branches and vines. The thicker roots that didn't get immediately vaporized were charred to the point that they crumbled into smoking charcoal a moment later and fell back down to the ground.
"Is that the best you got?" Alex asked softly. "Your northern brother was more troublesome, you know?"
Naturally, the treant couldn't hear his words, but it was still thoroughly enraged at having so many of its roots and branches destroyed and retaliated with even more branches.
"Now, should I play along and give you some time to shine, or should I just get this over with..." Alex wondered rhetorically, a playful expression on his face.
More vines erupted from the forest under him, but they were far fewer in number than before, when they had blotted the entire sky out. Alex noticed that the vines were much harder and shot toward him at an even greater speed than before, easily breaching Mach Two and reaching him even sooner.
Alex shook his head with an unconcerned expression and summoned an even stronger bolt of lightning to envelop him and destroy the encroaching vines. While they were harder, likely even more so than something like steel, it was impossible for something like that to easily break through
"If this is all you have, it's quite boring..." Alex shook his head and created a force field around the main trunk of the tree in front of him.
Before he could take action, however, he sniffed for a moment and raised his brows in surprise.
"Oh? This is a paralytic nerve toxin..." He said. "How ingenious. It expected me to use lightning as a counter and specifically modified the configuration of its roots to form the toxin in case of a lightning attack. You're way too useful to kill just like that, little tree..."
Alex's eyes had a possessive look of interest in them as he fully mobilized Susan's powers to wrap around the main trunk of the tree and started yanking it up into the air after solidifying the force field.
As Alex started pulling the tree up out of the ground, an ear-piercing screech resounded all around. It was loud enough to shake the surrounding air and made Alex wince instinctively as his grip momentarily loosened. However, he quickly tightened his grip on the tree's main trunk and continued pulling it out of the ground.
A few minutes later, the tree was fully removed from the forest, its roots extending for miles all around the place. As Alex pulled it out, the entire continent shook with such an intense earthquake that even if any survivors were remaining, they would have likely been crushed under rubble. No bomb shelter in the world could survive an earthquake that borderline split the continent in half.
Alex didn't care about the consequences of his actions and wrapped the tree with his body and sent it to the new island Susan had helped him set up. It would serve as the manager hub of the island's flora and also support him in maintaining the island's structural integrity.