The Core moved first.
One of the enormous weapon housings along its shoulder split open, armored plates the size of buildings folding aside as something buried deep within the machine began to gather power. Even from where I stood, I could feel the energy building, steadily climbing until the air itself seemed to vibrate around the weapon.
Then the world became red.
A beam of concentrated energy erupted from the Core's shoulder, wide enough to swallow a house and powerful enough that the clouds above were torn apart simply from its passage. I crossed the distance between us before it could reach the others and brought Rhongomyniad around to meet it head-on.
The resulting impact shattered the earth beneath my feet.
Stone cracked for hundreds of meters around me as the beam struck the divine lance and split, streams of red energy rushing past either side of my body and carving great glowing trenches through the landscape behind me. For perhaps the first time since awakening, the Core finally had enough room to properly unleash the weapons built into its colossal frame.
It was impressive.
Humanity had come far from the days it needed me to keep them safe from monsters; now they themselves made their own monsters.
Continuing to block the attack, I pushed forward.
Step by step at first, then faster, forcing my way directly into the beam until the distance between us disappeared. The Core attempted to increase its output, red light growing brighter and brighter around Rhongomyniad, but that merely caused the surrounding countryside to suffer more.
The divine spear, the lance Rhongomyniad, did not falter.
And neither did I.
I pushed forward until I finally reached the giant machine, then pushed off the ground in a charge.
Rhongomyniad struck the Core directly in the chest.
For something weighing thousands upon thousands of tons, seeing the enormous machine actually leave the ground was almost comical. Its feet tore free of the earth as the force of my blow hurled it backward, sending the Core crashing several hundred meters away before it finally struck the ground and carved a trench through the landscape.
Mordred whooped loudly behind me.
That appeared to be all the encouragement my knights required.
The Round Table charged.
Yet the Core wasn't human; it didn't need to deal with things the same way a human would.
A human warrior would first need to get up before they could continue the fight, but a machine didn't have the same requirements; it wasn't human and lacked many of the limitations we had.
So even as the knights charged toward it, weapons came online and lit up the space between the machine and its attackers.
Lasers, bullets, missiles, and burning-hot plasma arrived to block my knights as they made their assault.
And while it did slow them down, it was hardly enough to stop them; after all, those weapons, no matter how mighty, still lacked any mystic value, and as such, the ability to harm my knights' Spirit Origins.
The Core had barely begun forcing itself upright before Gawain reached it, his blade carving deep into one knee joint and causing the entire leg to buckle beneath its weight. Lancelot attacked the opposite side a heartbeat later, Arondight leaving a brilliant scar through layers of armor, while Tristan remained farther back and calmly destroyed every weapon emplacement that unfolded toward the others.
Mordred, naturally, went straight for the head.
Clarent struck the side of the Core's face hard enough to twist the giant machine's entire head around, buckling armor and sending fragments of black metal spinning through the air. He barely had time to admire his work before the Core's remaining hand swept upward and closed around him.
"MORDRED!" Gareth shouted as fingers larger than tree trunks wrapped around his brother.
The Core squeezed.
Had Mordred been an ordinary man, there would have been little left of him.
Unfortunately for the Core, Mordred Pendragon was anything but ordinary.
Red lightning began spilling between the machine's fingers.
"GET YOUR FILTHY HANDS OFF ME!"
Clarent erupted.
A crimson explosion swallowed the Core's entire hand, tearing armored fingers apart and sending fragments of molten metal raining across the battlefield. Mordred shot free from the blast, cloak burning slightly at the edges and an enormous grin plastered across his face.
Tony stared upward at him from a considerably safer distance. "I really don't know why I keep being surprised."
"Focus," Reed told him, though the scientist himself was very clearly watching the same spectacle.
"I am focused."
"No, you're watching."
Tony gestured helplessly toward Mordred, who was currently running along the Core's arm toward its head. "Can you blame me?"
Before Reed could answer, the Core began forcing itself upright again.
This time, Magneto stepped forward.
There was no longer a Nexus surrounding the machine.
No walls packed with anti-mutant emitters.
No layered suppression fields connected to the resources of an entire fortress.
Only the protection built into the Core itself remained, and while that protection was undoubtedly formidable, Stark and Richards had spent weeks studying the Sentinel technology specifically so they could overcome it.
The small device attached to Erik's clothing flashed once.
Then he smiled.
"Oh."
Tony heard him and looked over. "What?"
Magneto's smile widened as he raised both hands. "That was your mistake."
The Core stopped moving.
Not willingly.
Its entire colossal body began to tremble as Erik's power took hold, metal groaning across the battlefield while invisible force wrapped around thousands upon thousands of tons of machinery. The Sentinel attempted to raise one arm, only for the limb to jerk violently backward as Magneto forced it down again.
His cloak whipped behind him in the wind created by the Core's struggles.
"You built yourself from metal," Erik said, almost sounding offended by the stupidity of it.
Then he pulled.
The effort was enormous; sweat poured down his face as his body strained under the immense effort it took to manipulate the massive machine.
But Erik was fueled by rage, by hatred, the endless fury and contempt he felt toward the Sentinels and their goal, and so he roared as he pulled.
The first armor plate tore free from the Core's chest.
It was larger than a house.
My knights were forced to scatter as Erik sent it sailing through the air, and for a moment, even the battle seemed to slow as everyone watched Magneto begin tearing Trask's ultimate creation apart piece by piece.
Or so we believed.
The Core had been struggling violently beneath Erik's power, every movement slow and laboured as though the invisible force wrapped around it was all that kept the machine from collapsing.
Then it stopped struggling.
Erik smiled.
He thought he had won.
The Core moved.
Not slowly.
Not with the strained, jerking motions it had shown only moments earlier.
It surged forward with such sudden speed that the earth exploded beneath its feet, charging directly toward Erik, Stark, and Richards.
Magneto's expression changed instantly.
He clenched both hands.
Nothing happened.
His eyes widened.
He tried again, putting enough force into the motion that the enormous armor plate floating behind him twisted violently through the air.
The Core didn't so much as slow down.
"What?"
I reached them first.
Rhongomyniad struck the Core across the shoulder and knocked its charge aside, the gigantic machine crashing into the ground hard enough to send a wave of dirt and broken stone rolling across the battlefield.
Erik remained where he stood, hands still raised, staring at the Core with an expression I had rarely seen upon his face.
Confusion.
"I can't feel it."
Reed's head snapped toward him. "What?"
"The machine." Erik reached for it again with his power, his expression hardening. "It's gone."
Tony looked toward the multi-story Sentinel currently forcing itself out of the crater I had created. "Pretty sure it's still there."
"Not physically."
Reed was already checking his instruments.
Then his expression changed.
"The anti-mutant system."
Magneto looked toward him.
"It just increased its output by several orders of magnitude."
That made me understand.
I looked toward the Core.
It had known.
Of course it had known.
Every Sentinel ever created had been built with mutants in mind, and this machine stood at the absolute pinnacle of everything they had learned. Magneto was not some obscure ability Trask might have forgotten to consider.
He was Magneto.
The Master of Magnetism.
One of the most powerful mutants alive, and perhaps the single most obvious threat to any machine foolish enough to build itself from metal.
The Core had prepared for him.
More interestingly, it had deliberately hidden that fact.
It had allowed Erik to seize it.
Allowed him to feel it struggle.
Allowed him to tear away one of its armor plates.
All so that he would believe he had found its weakness and commit himself fully before the machine revealed that the weakness had never existed.
That was...
Almost human.
"It was pretending," Reed said quietly.
Tony looked toward him. "The killer robot just played possum?"
"Essentially."
Erik's surprise had already turned back into anger. "Then I will simply have to be less direct."
The armor plate he had torn free suddenly shot forward.
The Core could prevent Magneto from manipulating its body.
It could not prevent several hundred tons of steel from hitting it in the face.
The torn armor plate crossed the battlefield like an enormous blade, striking the Core across the side of its head with enough force to send the machine staggering several steps to the side. Before it could recover, Erik twisted one hand, causing the massive plate to stop in midair, reverse direction, and slam into it again from behind.
The Core stumbled forward this time.
Erik smiled.
Perhaps he could no longer reach into the machine itself and tear it apart from within, but that hardly meant his powers had suddenly become useless. The battlefield around us was filled with metal, from the countless pieces of the destroyed Nexus scattered across the landscape to the remains of ordinary Sentinels and the armor already torn from the Core itself.
For Magneto, it was an arsenal.
Another motion of his hands brought hundreds of smaller pieces into the air around him, the debris twisting together into long spears before accelerating toward the Core from every direction at once.
The machine reacted immediately.
Weapons opened across its body and filled the air with fire.
Some of Erik's projectiles were destroyed before they reached their target, lasers slicing through metal and plasma reducing others to molten droplets, but there were simply too many to stop them all. Dozens struck the Core, hammering against its armor until dents and cracks began appearing across its body.
Erik laughed.
"Do you truly believe denying me control of your body is enough?" he asked, his voice carrying easily across the battlefield as more wreckage rose around him. "Everything around you is mine."
The Core said nothing.
That alone should probably have warned him.
Instead, the giant machine raised one arm.
The weapons built into it changed.
Erik's smile faded slightly.
The Core had learned the same lesson he had.
Metal projectiles were useless against Magneto.
So it stopped using them.
Sections of armor folded aside, revealing weapons whose inner workings glowed with unfamiliar light. Energy gathered within them, not bullets or missiles that Erik could simply seize and throw back, but pure heat, radiation, plasma, and forces that his mastery over magnetism could not so easily turn aside.
The first beam fired.
Erik moved both hands, and the armor plate he had torn from the Core shot between them.
The beam struck it.
Metal glowed white.
Then orange.
Then disappeared.
Erik barely had enough time to throw himself aside before the remaining energy passed through where he had been standing and carved a burning trench through the earth behind him.
Tony stared at the result. "Okay, that's new."
"No," Reed corrected while watching the Core through his instruments. "It had those weapons before. It simply wasn't prioritizing them."
Of course.
The Core had known exactly what Erik could do from the beginning.
It hadn't merely prepared a defense against his powers.
It had prepared weapons specifically chosen to remain useful once those defenses were revealed.
Erik clearly understood that as well.
His expression became grim, but he refused to retreat.
More debris rose around him, this time forming a great wall rather than a weapon, several meters thick and layered from hundreds of overlapping pieces of steel. The next energy blast struck the barrier and burned through several layers before finally dissipating.
Erik answered by tearing a ruined support beam from the remains of the Nexus and launching it like a spear.
The Core twisted aside.
The support beam struck its shoulder instead of its chest, penetrating deep enough to remain embedded there.
Magneto clenched one fist.
The metal beam bent.
Not the Core.
The foreign object buried within it.
It twisted violently, tearing through machinery and armor from the inside before the Sentinel finally ripped the entire damaged section away and threw it aside.
Erik smiled again.
"Found a loophole."
Tony gave him an approving nod. "I'll give you that one."
The Core apparently did not share his appreciation.
Every weapon upon its upper body turned toward Magneto.
Then several turned toward Tony and Reed.
I immediately understood.
So did Erik.
"You bastard."
The Core fired.
Erik could have protected himself.
Instead, he threw both hands apart.
The enormous wall of debris surrounding him split into three sections, one racing toward Tony, another toward Reed, and the final portion remaining before himself.
Energy struck all three barriers.
The world vanished behind light.
Erik roared as his arms shook beneath the strain, metal melting almost as quickly as he could replace it. More wreckage tore free from the ground behind us and joined the barriers, but every second forced him to divide his attention between three different attacks.
The Core increased its output.
Erik dropped to one knee.
Still, he held.
"Get behind me!" he shouted.
"We already are!" Tony called back.
"Then stop talking!"
Another weapon opened upon the Core's shoulder.
Reed saw it first.
"Erik!"
"I see it!"
He didn't.
Not properly.
He was too busy holding back the other attacks.
The new weapon fired.
Not toward Magneto.
Toward the ground beside him.
The resulting explosion lifted half the battlefield into the air.
Erik's concentration broke.
His shields collapsed.
The Core's remaining weapons immediately adjusted their aim.
For perhaps a fraction of a second, everything pointed toward the three mortals standing together.
Then a golden figure appeared between them.
Galahad planted his feet and raised his shield as the first beam struck him.
The blast swallowed him entirely.
When the light faded, he remained standing.
Smoke rose from his shield.
Nothing more.
"Enough," Galahad said.
Lancelot appeared beside him before the Core could fire again, Arondight already drawn, while Gareth moved to Erik's side and pulled the exhausted mutant king back onto his feet.
Tristan raised Failnaught in the distance.
Mordred landed hard enough beside Gawain to crack the earth beneath his boots, Clarent resting against one shoulder while he stared up at the Core with an eager grin.
"You had your turn," he told Magneto.
Erik breathed heavily, sweat running down his face as he looked from Mordred to the colossal machine before them.
For a moment, pride clearly tempted him to argue.
Then another dozen weapon housings opened across the Core.
He reconsidered.
"Fine," Erik muttered. "But leave me something."
Mordred laughed.
"No promises."
Then the Knights of the Round Table charged once more.
(End of chapter)
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