[A/N]:The First goal for this week is 250 PowerStones for TWO bonus chapters. Comment, vote, and share if you're enjoying the chapter.
Tokyo, Japan - Shinjuku District
The Sentinel punched through the window, glass spraying inward as office workers scattered, some diving under desks while others froze in place, their instincts failing them. The robot's targeting system swept the room with precision.
"MUTANT SIGNATURE DETECTED. SURRENDER FOR PROCESSING."
Mariko Yashida rose from her desk, her hand finding the panic button, but she stopped when the Sentinel's weapon arm locked onto a young intern cowering in the corner. The girl pressed herself against the wall, hands shaking so badly she could barely keep them still.
"Onegaishimasu." The girl's Japanese came out in gasps, each word trembling with terror. "I just started here. Last week. Please."
The Sentinel's eye brightened with predatory focus. "MUTANT GENE CONFIRMED. RESISTANCE WILL RESULT IN TERMINATION."
The Yashida family protected their retainers; they always had, for generations, and some oversized robot wasn't changing centuries of tradition.
Mariko slammed the alarm.
Throughout the building, blast doors dropped while emergency lights pulsed in steady rhythm, and in the sub-basements, the Silver Samurai armor began its power-up sequence with a rising mechanical hum.
The wall exploded before she could move, not from the Sentinel but from something else entirely, something that burned with nuclear fire.
Sunfire crashed through, trailing flames that made the air shimmer and warp, his body radiating heat that distorted reality around him as he collided with the Sentinel hard enough to drive it through three walls and out into the Tokyo skyline.
"More are coming! Get out fast!" Sunfire's voice crackled through the heat distortion, urgent and commanding.
More Sentinels descended on Tokyo like something from a nightmare made real, dozens of them blotting out the afternoon sun.
Mumbai, India - Dharavi Slums
Krish's arms worked independently, pounding through a Sentinel's chest while another grabbed civilians and threw them toward safety. Three Sentinels fell in rapid succession, then five more rose to replace them like a hydra growing new heads.
"Bahut zyada hain! (There are too many of them!)" Chakra spun beside him, his shield swallowing attacks and redirecting them back at their sources. "Hum sab jagah ek saath nahin ho sakte! (We cannot be everywhere at once!)"
The density of the slums worked against them; too many people packed into too little space, every collapse killing dozens and every missed shot finding someone's grandmother, child or neighbor. The numbers were impossible and brutal.
A Sentinel tore through a school, and children screamed in voices that cut through everything else, even through the explosions and the chaos and the sound of metal tearing flesh.
Krish blurred, moving faster than he'd ever before as the building shook when he landed between the Sentinel and a classroom where six-year-olds huddled together, too young to understand why robots wanted them dead.
His fist moved with all his strength behind it.
The Sentinel became scrap metal and sparking circuits.
But outside, more advanced units descended, dozens more, with each destroyed unit feeding data to the collective network.
G-One and Chitti Robo fought their own battles across the city, their programming letting them predict Sentinel movements and counter them with finesse, but even they struggled with the sheer numbers pouring in. Mumbai had twenty million people, and the Sentinels didn't care about collateral damage or anything except their programming.
New York City - District X
The shields held, but barely, crackling with energy that threatened to fail at any moment.
Beautiful Dreamer gripped the console, sweat soaking through her shirt as around her the command center hummed with frantic activity and desperate coordination. Screens showed Sentinels hammering the barriers with methodical persistence, testing every weak point.
"North sector's at forty percent!"
"Rerouting auxiliary now!"
Below, the Morlocks fought with everything they had while Callisto's enhanced senses predicted attack patterns and Caliban's tracking identified which robots targeted which civilians, defenders positioning themselves accordingly with split-second timing.
The numbers kept climbing and made victory seem impossible.
A Sentinel broke through on the eastern perimeter, and Sunder met it with a roar that shook windows, struck with enough force to crater pavement and send shockwaves through the ground. The robot sparked and smoked, its chassis crumpling under the impact.
Two more replaced it before the first one hit the ground.
Marrow grabbed one in her bone claws as the robot, heated its plating until the metal glowed red; the bone glowed red too, conducting heat Marrow's body was never meant to handle, and she screamed but didn't let go, drove the machine into the ground with strength born from pure desperation.
Sack tore through another, his massive body scrambling its internal systems with exotic energies, but the plating shifted and reconfigured, blocked his next attempt with adaptive countermeasures.
They learned and got better with each passing second.
A little girl ran into the street, separated from her mother in the chaos, five years old maybe, her mutation letting her change her hair color in rapid succession. Useless in a fight and decorative at best.
A Sentinel locked on her with cold mechanical focus.
Shatter appeared in a blur of motion, scooped up the child and ducked into an alley, breathing hard as his hands trembled from exhaustion and fear. "Don't move, ok? Someone will come for you. I promise."
The girl nodded, crying silent tears that broke Shatter's heart.
Shatter ran back into the fight because hundreds more needed saving and he couldn't afford to think about the ones he'd miss.
Baxter Building - New York
The Sentinel approached Franklin Richards' nursery window with targeting protocols locked and firing sequence initialized.
But it ceased to exist.
Johnny Storm's nova flame melt the robot as the Sentinel went from solid matter to superheated plasma in under a second.
"Touch. My. Nephew. I fucking dare you." Johnny burned white-hot, his body a miniature sun suspended in the air.
More approached, and Johnny met them mid-air with fury that had been building since the invasion, each one that got within a hundred yards experiencing temperatures that didn't exist anywhere on Earth's surface.
Reed Richards operated the building's systems with fluid efficiency, his body stretched across a dozen controls simultaneously, each limb working a different station. "Susan, shield integrity?"
"Ninety-five percent stable." Sue's force fields formed a shimmering dome over the building, invisible but impenetrable. "But if they maintain this assault pattern for another hour Manhattan will..."
"They won't." Reed's voice carried absolute certainty, that came from calculating a thousand variables and seeing only one outcome. "Johnny's handling it."
And he was, the Human Torch carving through the Sentinel swarm like a knife through paper as every robot within a hundred yards died in mechanical agony, circuits frying and plating vaporizing.
Ben Grimm blocked the Yancy Street, his rocky form filling the space as an immovable orange barrier. "Ain't nobody gettin' past me. Not today. Ya hear me?"
Inside Baxter Building's nursery, Alicia held baby Franklin close as he babbled in baby-talk, unaware that killer robots wanted him dead, that his existence threatened people powerful enough to deploy armies. His reality-warping powers could have erased the Sentinels with a thought, rewritten them out of existence, but Jay had limited them for his own protection; now Franklin was just a baby with ordinary vulnerabilities.
His family would protect him with everything they had.
Xavier's School - Westchester
Scott's optic blast carved through three Sentinels in a single sweep, the crimson energy superheating their plating faster than they could adapt. They fell in smoking ruins, then more rose from the tree line like a tide that wouldn't stop.
"We can't hold them!" Bobby's ice slides formed and shattered under energy fire, each one lasting seconds before melting. "There's too many! They just keep coming!"
"We hold the line!" Scott's voice cut through the chaos like a blade, commanding and absolute. "We don't let them reach the students! That's the mission, and we don't fail missions! Not now, not ever!"
Inside, younger mutants huddled together in the reinforced common room, some crying openly, others staring in shock at screens showing the battle, while a few tried to be brave for the others.
Fear showed through anyway, in trembling hands and wide eyes.
In the infirmary, Hank worked with controlled urgency to stabilize the Brotherhood; Magneto remained unconscious despite the combat cocktail in his system, Mystique's breathing came shallow and irregular, Toad had lost too much blood for his healing factor to compensate quickly.
Outside, the Sentinels kept coming in endless waves.
Jean Grey floated above the battlefield, telekinesis holding back a dozen robots simultaneously, invisible hands crushing circuits and bending metal.
A Sentinel broke through the telekinetic barrier, charging toward the front entrance where students were visible through the windows, their faces pressed against the glass.
Kurt Wagner appeared in its path with a BAMF of displaced air, smoke dissipating around him in acrid curls. "Not today, mein Freund."
He teleported with the Sentinel five hundred feet straight up, broke it's thrusters and gravity handled the rest with brutality; the robot slammed into the ground hard enough to crater the lawn and shake the building's foundation.
Kurt's exhaustion showed in every line of his body, sweat pouring down his blue face and staining his costume, his breathing ragged and desperate because teleporting too many times too soon did that.
But he saw fifty more Sentinels surrounded the school in a tightening perimeter.
Los Angeles - Sunset Boulevard
The Sentinel smashed through the café's front window as civilians scattered in blind panic, tables and chairs flying like toys while a mutant teenager tried to run on legs that wouldn't cooperate. His power let him change object smell with a touch; utterly useless in a fight.
The Sentinel's weapon charged with a rising whine. "MUTANT IDENTIFIED. CEASE RESISTANCE."
"He's just a kid!" Someone screamed from behind an overturned table, voice cracking with terror. "Jesus Christ, leave him alone! He can't even hurt you!"
The Sentinel didn't care about age or threat assessment beyond genetic markers.
The blast fired.
Surge appeared in crackling blue electricity that lit up the café in strobing flashes, her body absorbing the attack and channeling it through her nervous system; she'd been three blocks away, heard the commotion, ran at superhuman speed that left ozone in her wake.
"Back off, you oversized toaster!" Her hands sparked with stolen energy, bright and dangerous, before she released it in a concentrated burst that fried the Sentinel.
The robot collapsed in a heap of smoking metal.
The teenager stared, his voice shaking with shock and disbelief. "You... you saved me. Why? You don't even know me."
"That's what heroes do, kid." Surge helped him up with surprising gentleness, checking him for injuries with practiced efficiency. "Now get somewhere safe. This isn't over, not by a long shot."
More Sentinels converging on their location as their programming had identified a concentration of mutant signatures worth investigating.
Surge's communicator crackled with other invasion veterans checking in, voices she recognized from New York: Sunspot from Brazil, Armor from Japan, Dust from Afghanistan, all responding to the crisis with the kind of coordination that came from fighting together before.
They'd fought aliens together, saved the world once against impossible odds.
They could do it again, had to do it again, because what other choice was there?
London - Trafalgar Square
The Sentinels spoke in modulated accents that made the situation somehow worse.
"PROCEED TO THE DESIGNATED PROCESSING CENTER. RESISTANCE IS INADVISED."
Processing center, the words making blood run cold in every person who knew their history, who remembered what processing centers meant.
An elderly woman with grey hair stepped forward from the crowd, her mutation letting her see three seconds ahead, helpful for crossing streets safely; she'd lived quietly for decades, never hurt anyone or drew attention.
"I'm eighty-seven years old, you know." Her voice carried clearly despite the tremor, decades of proper elocution training overriding fear. "Never committed a crime in my life. Pay my taxes on time. Volunteer at church every Sunday. So would you mind explaining what exactly I'm being processed for?"
The Sentinel's eye focused with mechanical precision. "MUTANT GENOME DETECTED. REMAND TO CUSTODY FOR RE-EDUCATION AND SOCIETAL REINTEGRATION."
"Re-education." Her voice shook with something between rage and fear, with memories that wouldn't stay buried. "I'm old enough to remember what that meant the first time. My parents fled Germany in '38 because of re-education. I won't go through it again."
The Sentinel advanced with inevitable mechanical certainty. "COOPERATION IS MANDATORY."
Union Jack appeared in a blur of motion, costume bearing fresh scorch marks from recent combat in Manchester; he'd driven back at speeds that would've gotten him arrested under normal circumstances. "Touch that woman and I'll scrap you for parts, mate. Try me."
More British heroes arrived in rapid succession: Spitfire, moving so fast she blurred into afterimages with Excalibur united, their coordination tested but holding together through sheer determination.
The Sentinels kept coming in waves that seemed endless, and across London, the scene repeated like a nightmare on loop: mutants rounded up, humans protesting, robots that didn't care about protests or history or basic human decency.
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