"Agent Johnson, you are exhausting my patience."
Magneto was well and truly on the back foot. Eyeing Cap's fists—proportioned like small cannonballs—the old man had serious doubts about whether his elderly frame could absorb more than a few of those before something structural gave way.
His weathered face tightened. The ambient magnetic field escalated another notch—every piece of metal in the car, except for those near Daisy and Cap, was now under his direct control.
The grinding grew louder. He seized the metal at Rogue's feet, twisted it into a grip, and launched her upward toward himself—feet-first, dangling.
"Underestimating me? Get back here!" Daisy shoved with magnetism and hauled back with gravity, dragging Rogue several meters back toward her.
"Old man, you can still walk away from this."
She pushed her ability to maximum output. The entire car began to vibrate—a low-frequency mode that trembled through the floor and walls. Another slice of the magnetic field came apart.
Whatever his academic credentials on paper, Magneto operated at a doctorate level in applied physics. He'd figured out Daisy's power source.
"Good ability." He regarded her with something approaching professional respect. "But you're far too young."
Then he released.
The burst was enormous. The whole space seemed to lurch, every metal object in range snapping toward him by magnetic force. Rogue flew toward Magneto in a panic.
"Let her go!" Daisy frowned—and at the same moment, Cap grabbed the car's window curtains and wrapped them around Rogue, using them as a line to haul her back.
The ceiling tore open.
Wolverine dropped through it like a guillotine, adamantium claws extended, and sheared through the twisted iron clamped around Rogue's feet in a single stroke.
Daisy stared. Logan was exactly as she remembered: jaw full of stubble, every muscle accounted for, and—currently—absolutely drenched in sweat. He looked like he'd run here.
"Logan, take her and go!"
She was already spreading her own magnetic field as a buffer. A thousand Wolverines couldn't beat one Magneto. Adamantium was a liability here, not an asset. Getting Rogue clear was the only sensible move.
Cap hadn't seen Logan since the war. He recognized the face immediately—registered the confusion, the old comrade, the same face in a different decade—and filed it away without a word. Questions later.
Logan had lost most of his memories from that era. But he remembered Daisy. His nose twitched: confirmed.
He ignored the suggested retreat entirely and charged Magneto.
Daisy quietly cursed this liability of a teammate under her breath.
Magneto lit up. "The one they call Logan. I've heard of you." One finger extended, almost casually.
Wolverine stopped mid-air. Every voluntary movement gone, arms rigidly extended by the pull on his adamantium frame.
Daisy jumped to his side. His controlled arm swung aimed straight at her head; she twisted sideways to dodge.
"Trust me. I'm not going to hurt you."
Their eyes met. Logan couldn't move anything but his eyes. He looked at her steadily—a signal of agreement.
"This might free you from the magnetic control. It's going to hurt. Brace yourself."
Her wrist trembled—not metaphorically, but literally, the fine involuntary oscillation of someone initiating a weak decay cascade through physical resonance. The shaking looked like the onset of a palsy. Then white light, transparent and cold, appeared at her fingertips.
Magnetism and gravity were control. Strong force and weak force were destruction.
Weak interaction broke structural symmetry. Induced decay. Shattered parity conservation at the particle level. Strong force, at higher levels—omega-level application—could reconstitute matter entirely. She wasn't there yet. What she could do, at the basic end of the spectrum, was destroy. Set off massive energy release.
The same principle as nuclear fission: increase the number of fission events, lower the threshold for triggering them. Whether that was exactly how the physics worked in this application still needed real-world testing—Earth wasn't an ideal development environment for strong-force work, and her own body wasn't quite built to handle the full range yet.
Five distinct force-signatures entered Wolverine's body and anchored into the adamantium woven through his skeleton—specifically there, where his nervous system interfaced with the metal. This was weak interaction deployed at higher order: targeting parity conservation directly.
When the symmetry shattered, the magnetic grip had nothing left to hold onto.
There was a significant downside to weak force applications, which was why she rarely deployed them in real combat: they were radioactive. Generated beta radiation in quantity. Beta rays were electron streams—burning to exposed tissue, lethal at sustained dosage. The silver lining: low penetrating power. Stay outside the immediate exposure zone and you were fine.
What Daisy had just done was inject this into a living body—which in gaming terms was the equivalent of activating a physics-edition magic-immunity state. It drained HP every second. Drastically. But most physics-based control effects couldn't touch you.
For any normal person, this was mutual destruction. For Wolverine—well, Daisy estimated the healing factor would handle it. Probably.
"Agh—what the hell is this thing—" Logan's face contorted. He clenched his jaw and refused to scream, but the words came out wrenched. The interaction was running along his entire nervous system at once.
Daisy watched his face go sallow and ashen, large patches of skin necrotizing rapidly across his face and body.
"Logan. How are you feeling?"
He took two deep breaths. The healing factor was firing—rebuilding faster than the damage accumulated, barely. The crease in his brow was tight enough to cut glass.
He looked at her. "Your ability's pretty good. I think I'm out of the control." He snapped his claws out and fixed Magneto with the look of someone making a commitment.
She had an impulse to pat his shoulder—then watched the skin there die and regrow and die again in a continuous loop, and thought better of it.
"Of course. I calculated it," Daisy said. "That state will hold for about two minutes. In that window, no physical properties can control you."
Wolverine didn't wait for elaboration. He launched at Magneto claws-first.
Unlike Captain America—unarmed and broadly reluctant to kill anyone—Logan had no psychological reservations about it whatsoever. The adamantium claws went to work without ceremony.
Daisy handed Rogue off to Cap and turned her attention back to Magneto's field.
"Too late to run, old man."
Her tone was light. Her mind was running scenarios. Magneto had developed his abilities comprehensively over decades—offense, defense, flight, everything. Pinning him down was going to be hard. And given Lorna's involvement, she couldn't cleanly put him down even if the opening appeared.
"Get out of my way!" Magneto had tolerated the claws long enough. Can't control the adamantium skeleton? Fine—expand the control range.
The wrenching screech of metal tearing itself apart filled the car from every direction simultaneously. The entire train came under magnetic control—folding inward, crumpling, rolling toward the three of them like something crushed in a giant's fist.
For villains who liked to destroy the terrain, Daisy didn't have much of a solution. Amtrak was just unlucky. If they had the nerve, they were welcome to go bill Magneto for the damages.
Cap booted the deformed door off its hinges, locked one arm around Rogue's shoulders, and sprinted for open air—waving urgently at the bystanders still filming on their phones.