Charles Xavier was the soul of the X-Men—the light that kept hundreds of Mutants from drifting into despair. If Charles died, the loss wouldn't just be a headline. It would be a massacre of hope.
Every mission those second-generation exosuits had was surgical: don't wreck buildings, kill the mind that holds them together. So the suits slipped into the academy through the sewers and made straight for the monitoring room where Charles worked.
The first explosion Ryuuto and the others heard was the exosuit smashing into the surveillance hub. Charles—calm and small in his chair—reacted the way only a telepath could. He pressed his fingertips to his temple and dove into the pilot's mind.
A flood of memory hit the soldier: a childhood beatings, a father's fist, the sweet, crushing shame. The soldier went blank, his hands twitching as the exosuit's targeting screamed and the beam burned a hole in the wall. If Charles had been a second later, he would have been vaporized.
Another exosuit materialized outside the window, muzzle leveled. Before it could fire, Ryuuto was already there—like a shadow that carved through glass.
"Earth Style — Earth Dynamic Core!" he roared.
Chakra sank into the floor. The ground convulsed and a geyser of earth slammed into the airborne exosuit, tearing it off balance and sending its energy beam skyward. Ryuuto didn't want to spectacle a killing in front of Charles; he kicked the wrecked machine out of the room and slammed the door shut.
Gathering chakra in his palms, Ryuuto vaulted after it. The exosuit plummeted down the stairwell. He exploded after it.
"Ninjutsu — Part Expansion!" His arm ballooned with chakra, a grotesque and powerful growth that increased the force behind his strike. He stomped onto the descending hull, planted both feet, and punched a roaring Rasengan into the suit's chest.
Second-gen armor shrugged off bullets, but Ryuuto's Rasengan punched through like a celestial drill. Plates ripped, circuitry fried, and the soldier inside went red with his own blood as the suit failed spectacularly.
Ryuuto's face, splattered with gore, slid back into the corridor. He returned to the monitoring room like a grim patron.
Charles stared—expectant, relieved, frightened. Ryuuto's eyes were cold and empty as a grave. Under that emotionless mask throbbed a red, savage heart—and every drop of that blood was for Axville Academy.
Outside, another exosuit hovered, chest cannon already charging. The beam lanced for Ryuuto; he moved with impossible speed and rode onto the shoulder of the suit, slashing down to peel the faceplate away. The soldier's expression—wide, tiny, terrified—met his for a breath.
Ryuuto's mouth twisted into something like amusement. He sealed his hands and spat the command.
"Illusory Skill — Knife of Killing Intent!"
A phantom blade unfurled over the room, razor-thin and dripping shadow. It didn't physically touch the soldier—yet the mind is a fragile battlefield. The illusion carved through the pilot's perception: he saw himself ripped limb from limb, flesh peeled, bones snapping. The scene played with full sensory cruelty—pain, smell, heat—and the soldier screamed as though it were happening for real.
The real world obeyed the fiction.
The pilot thrashed, clawed at phantom wounds, begged for mercy. In the next heartbeat, the exosuit's own chest cannon hammered his head into paste. The illusion was surgical. It made a man kill himself to avoid a nonexistent death.
Two exosuits lay in smoking piles now. Only one remained. Ryuuto pinged the team through the comms: find the last suit, now.
At the Fantastic Four base, the worst was happening. Reed, Johnny, Ben, and the students were sealed inside a hardened air-defense bunker—Noah's-ark engineering that might survive anything but the sun itself. The Thermal Core missile had come down, and Stark's logo gleamed on its side; they'd traced it back to Stark Industries hardware.
Tony, strapped into his new fourth-generation armor, was already streaking toward the missile. He'd answered a different call—guilt, maybe, or something sharper. He knew the Department of Defense had greenlit the strike; he also knew too many of his earlier arms deals lived in government arsenals.
"J.A.R.V.I.S., find a safe intercept zone," he barked, watching the missile thread the sky.
Back at the academy, Ryuuto's HUD pinged him.
[Mission Posted] Destroy the humanoid exosuit that infiltrated the school.
[Reward] 10× Life Potions.
He'd thought the suits would storm in from ground or air. Instead one had slithered up through the sewers—coward's route, surgical placement. Ryuuto moved like a blade to where the feed had gone dark.
Every second counted. The academy's monitoring mesh flickered with static, the air hummed, and the last exosuit—silent and patient—breathed somewhere inside the school's belly.
Ryuuto stepped into the dark and smiled like a god.