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Tilting its head sideways, bending forward, one eye wide and the other narrowed, the blood-smeared smiling face painted across its features seemed to be genuinely grinning beneath the gore.
"So… does that matter?" it asked.
The sight sent a chill down the Sentry's spine. It reminded him of the days when he had still been an ordinary man—when loan sharks selling narcotics had cornered him in an alley over unpaid debts and beaten him bloody.
The smile on their faces back then had been just as horrifying as the one before him now.
Descending from the sky, Phoenix Girl hurriedly stepped in front of him. At the start of the battle, its face might still have looked somewhat human, but now it no longer bothered concealing its true nature.
"Henry, stop. Hand the Sentry over to the Professor. We can work with Professor X's abilities and make sure that dark personality never appears again."
It answered with a ghastly grin.
"A dead Sentry is the only good Sentry."
"I won't allow you to do this." Jean Grey refused to yield an inch. Raising both hands before her, she erected a defensive barrier empowered by the Phoenix Force. "Don't kill. Don't stain your hands for any reason. It isn't worth it."
It did not argue with Phoenix Girl over whether it should or shouldn't.
Instead, power gathered in its left eye.
A strange and ominous crimson glow intensified until it nearly became tangible, rippling beyond the socket itself.
In the distance, the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj and Scarlet Witch, along with the other mystics, were rapidly approaching. Under Professor X's leadership, they intended to eradicate the Sentry's mental instability once and for all and permanently seal away the Void.
Seeing this, Jean Grey naturally moved to stop the man before her. She unleashed her telekinesis, attempting to shove Henry away.
Enhanced by the Phoenix Force, even Superman himself could not withstand the blow head-on. It was blasted several meters backward on the spot.
Yet from its rupturing left eye shot an abnormal crimson beam.
At several interceptable points, the beam abruptly bent at impossible angles, tracing eerie geometric patterns through the air before silently piercing Phoenix Girl's defenses and striking the Sentry behind her.
There was no scream, no terrifying explosion.
It was simply like a burning candle being snuffed out beneath a candle extinguisher.
His flame of life ended just like that.
The man named Robert Reynolds collapsed face-first onto the shattered roadway, amid rubble left by the battle.
His pupils dilated. His heartbeat stopped. The consciousness belonging to that body was completely annihilated. Even color faded from him, leaving behind only a broken, ashen corpse.
Following the beam's trajectory, Jean Grey turned her head and only managed to catch sight of the fallen Sentry lying in the dust.
Disappointment flooded her to the extreme.
Furious, she glared at the man clutching his left eye, unable to stop blood from pouring through his fingers.
The Phoenix Force symbolized both the cosmos and emotion. Calmness had never been a trait of its hosts.
Its defiant act pushed Jean Grey into a complete eruption.
Massive amounts of Phoenix Force burst forth, naturally forming flaming wings behind her back. Firelight rippled across her body while her hair floated wildly in the air, every sign showing that her power stood on the razor's edge between control and rampage.
Jean Grey shouted angrily,
"How dare you…!"
The response to the enraged Phoenix was another beam—from the right eye.
Earlier, through the Void's head, it had exchanged punches with some unknown existence. Since then, something indescribable had entered its body—something incomprehensible, deeply unsettling.
As that power poured into its heat vision, the energy flooded the eye itself. The instant it fired, the eyeball exploded outright.
But the results were equally satisfying.
The Sentry was dead.
Facing the wrathful threat of the Phoenix, it poured all remaining power into its other eye. Even at the cost of total blindness, it fired a second shot!
This attack carried the power of complete erasure from another world—destruction at the level of causality itself.
But the Phoenix originated from the primal universe, an immortal, eternal, yet ever-changing existence across the multiverse. How could its causality possibly be erased by some rootless foreign power?
The two forces fundamentally opposed one another from their very origins. If the Phoenix lost, the universe itself might collapse into extinction.
Thus, this clash carried terrifying implications, entangling countless things.
And Jean Grey became the battlefield upon which the secret struggle unfolded.
The outcome held no suspense.
The Phoenix won.
But how could the vessel serving as the battlefield possibly emerge unscathed?
The terrifying power of annihilation ravaged every inch of Jean Grey's flesh. One moment she turned to ash, the next she regenerated anew.
The two primordial forces battled repeatedly from head to toe, leaving not a single inch untouched. The agony was beyond anything ordinary people could imagine.
Jean Grey dropped to her knees and opened her mouth, trying to scream and relieve the pain, yet not a sound emerged.
Her comrades in the X-Men—past and present alike—could never stand by while their teammate suffered like this.
Quicksilver was the first to rush forward, intending to pull Jean Grey back to safety.
There was clearly something terribly wrong with Henry. Even Quicksilver felt fear now. In a situation like this, how could he dare remain near a man clutching both bleeding eyes?
Yet he could not drag Jean Grey away either.
Though his mutant powers were formidable and held enormous potential, they still could not compare to a force on the level of the Phoenix.
It was not the Phoenix protecting itself. Rather, while the out-of-control Phoenix Force annihilated everything approaching her, the opposing power of causal termination leaking from the clash also spread outward, affecting nearby people and objects.
Quicksilver returned empty-handed.
That only agitated another man even further.
Scott Summers—Jean Grey's boyfriend, Cyclops of the X-Men.
He had never liked that self-proclaimed alien to begin with. Especially not after the guy dressed himself up as Superman. Who didn't grow up reading Superman comics?
Now his girlfriend had been hurt.
How could he not lose his mind?
Without caring whether the other man's eyes were ruined or whether he could still see, Cyclops directly activated the switch on his visor. Crimson concussive beams connected to another dimension instantly blasted forth toward its back!
Revenge had been achieved, yet regret remained. That was why it was still so crazed.
Perhaps time could eventually soothe its emotions and let it recover its former self.
But in this situation, any act of aggression would only provoke an even more violent response.
Its eyes were indeed blind from abusing a power it did not fully understand.
But its other super senses still remained.
It had already dared to beat up a woman like Phoenix Girl.
Did it really need to consult an auspicious date before beating up Cyclops too?
Activating super speed, it prepared to separate Cyclops's head from his body with a single punch—
Only for the strike to unexpectedly miss.
Because Quicksilver had snatched Cyclops away first.
"Whoa! Brother, calm down. We can talk this out," Quicksilver tried to mediate.
But the man he had saved clearly had no intention of backing down.
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