"Monster," the scientist spat, pressing his back against the wall as the figure moved toward him through the dark corridor. His voice was shaking but his eyes were furious, the kind of fury that only shows up in people who know they've already lost. "You're a monster. All of you deserve to die."
The figure stopped walking. Just for a moment. Then the faintest trace of something that wasn't quite a smile crossed his face.
"Monster," he repeated, letting the word sit in the air between them for a second. "Coming from someone like you, I'll take that as a compliment." His eyes, faintly luminous in the dark, didn't blink. "There should be a hell somewhere in this universe. I genuinely hope you enjoy the trip."
He didn't waste any more words after that.
"Elric." Jin's voice came through clean and quiet. "All the children have been moved. The base is clear whenever you're ready."
"Good work Jin. Go with them."
A brief pause. "Understood."
After Jin's signal cut out, Elric stood alone in the corridor for a moment. In every other base before this one, the next step had been simple — level the building, move on, repeat. But this time he didn't reach for the obvious. Instead he opened his Byakugan, let his vision stretch outward through walls and floors and reinforced concrete until the full layout of the building mapped itself out in front of him.
There. Underneath everything else. A hidden laboratory that didn't appear on any official blueprint.
That was what he'd actually come for.
He hadn't been doing this out of the goodness of his heart. That was worth being honest about.
Twenty three bases this month. Twenty three locations raided, stripped of their mutant captives, and reduced to rubble. And not one of them had been motivated by some burning sense of justice or moral obligation. He'd been looking for something specific, and the people running these facilities had hidden it frustratingly well.
Sebastian Shaw's body.
The problem was that the people behind these labs were genuinely careful. No communication between locations, no shared records, no external contact for staff who lived inside the facilities year round. Even Professor X would have had a difficult time pinning down their locations. The only reliable method had turned out to be brute force — find one, tear it apart, move to the next.
Twenty three bases. And now, finally.
The room he dropped into wasn't large. Just a standard experimental space, clean and cold and clinical, the kind of room that looked ordinary right up until you looked at what was actually inside it. Elric scanned the contents, and despite himself, he felt a slow smile settle onto his face.
"Jackpot."
Not only was Sebastian Shaw's body here, perfectly preserved in a cryogenic chamber, but in the adjacent unit was another figure he recognized immediately.
Azazel. The Red Devil. The teleporting mutant who'd worked with Shaw.
Sebastian Shaw—one of the main villains of this era, possessing the power of energy absorption. He could absorb virtually any form of energy and redirect it, even withstanding a nuclear blast at point-blank range.
In the grand scheme of cosmic threats, it wasn't the most impressive power. But for Elric's purposes? Absolutely something he wanted.
You could never go wrong with energy absorption.
Combined with Kevin's material absorption abilities—which he could now access through their shared connection in the white space—there would be nothing in this world he couldn't absorb.
He thought back to Asgard, to the runes that had sent him helplessly through time. If he'd had this power then, he could have simply absorbed the energy from those runes directly, nullifying them completely.
It's time for a new ability.
Elric approached Shaw's containment unit and opened it. The body was pristine, perfectly preserved. He placed his hand on the cold flesh.
His absorption ability activated.
And then something unexpected happened.
He'd assumed it would work like his other copied powers—that he'd absorb Shaw's DNA and be able to transform into a version with that ability, similar to how Kevin could shift between alien forms.
But the moment the DNA entered his system, his cells went into overdrive.
They activated with unusual intensity, analyzing and breaking down Shaw's genetic structure at incredible speed. And then, without Elric doing anything, his cells perfectly simulated Shaw's mutation.
But they didn't stop there.
It was almost as if his body was communicating with him: "If you want this power, you can have it. But don't even think about keeping this shit DNA in your body permanently."
His cells copied the mutation perfectly, integrated the ability into his own genetic structure, then ejected the foreign DNA entirely—splitting it back out of his body as waste material.
The result was far beyond what he'd expected.
If he'd had to transform his cells to use the power, it would have been useful but limited—requiring conscious activation, draining energy to maintain the transformation.
But this? This was completely different.
The energy absorption was now a passive ability. Always active. Part of his base form.
There was no comparison.
Elric clenched his fist, feeling the new power humming beneath his skin. Any energy directed at him would now be absorbed automatically, converted and stored for his use.
His eyes moved to the next target.
Azazel's body waited in its own containment unit.
Teleportation, Elric thought hungrily. Let's see what other surprises my body has in store.
........
"Magneto." The officer's voice was carefully controlled, the tone of someone trying very hard to project authority over a situation they weren't fully confident they commanded. The trees around them were quiet. Too quiet. "Come with us. No one needs to get hurt today."
Erik looked at his daughter's face. Nina, watching him with wide eyes that were trying very hard not to be afraid. Then he looked at the men around them, at the weapons, at the specific and familiar shape of a situation that had no good exit.
He let his shoulders drop, just slightly.
"Let Nina go," he said. "I'll come with you."
They'd come for him. Only him. So there was no point complicating it — he released the tension he'd been holding, the invisible current of his ability that kept every metallic surface within a quarter mile quietly oriented toward him, and he let it go still. Beside him he felt Nina exhale.
The officers exchanged a glance. Then they stepped back from her.
He could have killed every single one of them before they'd finished forming their perimeter. He knew that, and somewhere in the back of his mind he suspected they knew it too. But his wife was at home. His children went to sleep at night without nightmares, which was a thing that had taken years to be true. He was tired, genuinely tired, of being the reason good things ended.
So he didn't fight.
He should have.
He understood that later, in the specific and shattering way you understand something that cannot be undone. Because the world, which had never much cared what Erik Lehnsherr had decided to be on any given day, had other plans entirely.
Nina saw them leading him away.
And something inside her, something she hadn't known was there and didn't know how to control, came surging to the surface all at once.
The birds in the trees went still for one single breath.
Then they exploded into motion.
The attack was instant and overwhelming, a living storm of feathers and noise that hit the officers like a wave. In the chaos, somebody panicked. Somebody always panicked. A hand found a weapon that shouldn't have been drawn, a wooden bolt released from a crossbow that had no business being pointed in that direction —
And Erik watched it happen.
He watched it happen and he was too far away and he was too slow and for once in his life all the power in the world meant absolutely nothing.
He caught them both before they hit the ground.
He sat there in the dirt of the forest floor with their weight in his arms and the birds still wheeling overhead and the officers standing completely silent around him, and he felt nothing. Not rage, not grief, not the thing that usually lived underneath both of those. Just a vast, white, empty nothing that was somehow worse than all of it.
Then, without looking up, without loosening his grip, he killed every single officer in the clearing. It took about four seconds. He didn't remember deciding to do it.
After the last one dropped he just sat there.
Is this what you wanted from me, he thought, to no one and everyone and the particular shape of a world that kept taking things from him. Is this what I am.
"No."
The voice came from somewhere behind him. Mechanical.
"You're not this, Erik. You never were." A pause, just long enough to mean something. "You're better than this. You always have been."
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