Chapter 69: Locking onto the Hellfire Club
The white light in her palm hadn't even fully dissipated before the apartment floor began to crack.
Daisy looked down at her hands; her ten fingers were perfectly still, having nothing to do with this.
The cracks started from the floor tiles directly beneath the coffee table, spreading in all directions along the concrete joints; it wasn't the tiles themselves that were cracking. A purple-gray light seeped through the gaps, and something was oozing up from beneath the floor, carrying the dry, acrid scent of paper just before it scorches.
An extremely low-frequency hum resonated in Arthur's eardrums.
Space itself was trembling.
His Arcane perception completed its judgment within 0.3 seconds: the thickness of the dimensional wall was plummeting, and the boundaries of two Universes were accelerating their compression at a point three hundred meters above this apartment.
Wanda was the first to buckle.
Her Chaos Magic was naturally an antenna for perceiving dimensional fluctuations, with a sensitivity far exceeding any instrument. At this moment, the World before her eyes split in two—on the left was the afternoon Sun of New York, and on the right was a city covered in ruins under a gray sky. The two images overlapped, their edges constantly collapsing and reorganizing.
Low buildings. Gray roofs. Some kind of metal structure shaped like a transmission tower mounted on top.
People. Wearing uniforms that didn't belong to this World.
It was too much.
Wanda clutched her temples with both hands and crouched down. The red light between her fingers scattered uncontrollably, burning a scorched ring into the sofa cushion.
"Wanda!"
Pietro rushed to her side in one step, but the moment his hand touched her shoulder, he was repelled by the red light, sliding two meters back until his back hit the wall.
Daisy's hands were also shaking. It wasn't that her powers were out of control—the entire building was twisting in a non-physical way, and her body was instinctively resonating with this distortion.
Arthur didn't waste a single word.
He summoned his staff from the void and slammed the Base of it heavily onto the floor.
A blue Arcane magic circle spread out from the Base of the staff, moving so fast that the patterns covered the entire apartment floor before the eye could even catch them. Upon touching the walls, it continued to climb, extending along the wall surfaces to the ceiling and closing overhead.
The entire apartment was encased in a complete blue spherical shell.
The dimensional tremors slammed into the surface of the shell and were deflected. The purple-gray cracks were forced back beneath the floor, and the gaps in the tiles returned to their normal gray color.
Wanda's rapid breathing gradually slowed down, and the red light between her fingers mostly retracted, but she remained crouched on the ground, the veins at her temples throbbing.
"I saw another World," her voice trembled. "There are people there, many people. Their World is shattering."
Arthur walked over and crouched down, his right palm hovering three inches above her head. A strand of Arcane Thread probed into her perceptual layer, peeling away the images of the alien World one by one.
Wanda's brow slowly relaxed, and she looked up at him, the corners of her eyes still tinged with red.
"Who are those people?"
"New neighbors. The kind with a rather bad temper."
Arthur helped her up and turned toward the floor-to-ceiling window.
Above the New York skyline outside the window, an aurora was unfolding. Bands of emerald green and rose pink light swirled in the mid-latitude sky where an aurora should never appear, stretching longer and longer, unable to retract.
People on the street were already pointing at the sky and taking photos.
Arthur didn't look at those.
He was looking at what lay behind the aurora: a layer of gray noise covering the highest point of the sky, constantly flickering, disappearing, and reappearing. It was the kind of snow that jumps on an old TV screen after the signal is lost.
Two Universes were squeezing together there.
The Arcane Mark on his palm burned to the point of pain.
That Omega-level telepathic signal, catalyzed by the thinning of the dimensional wall, had completely broken through the attenuation threshold, and all the information came flooding in.
Coordinates. Images. Emotions.
One thousand and thirty-seven meters underground. An artificial cavity between the magma layer and the granite layer. A hidden Base of the Hellfire Club. Hundreds of heavy mechs equipped with Mutant gene suppressors.
A blonde woman knelt in a pool of blood.
White crystals peeled off her shoulders and arms in patches, revealing the pale skin and crisscrossing wounds beneath. Her Diamond Form could no longer be maintained.
She was using her last breath of mental energy to cry out to the World.
She had been calling for three days.
No one had answered.
Until now.
Arthur withdrew his hand.
"Daisy."
Daisy had already pulled out her phone, her thumb hovering over the contacts—her training as an Agent made her first reaction to any anomalous event to call for backup.
"I'll contact Fury and call in a team—"
"It's useless."
Daisy's hand stopped.
"Over a thousand meters underground, Mutant gene suppression fields are fully active, plus there's spatial turbulence caused by dimensional instability," Arthur's tone was as flat as a weather report. "If S.H.I.E.L.D. people go down, they won't even understand how they died."
Daisy gripped her phone, her lips thinning. She knew he was right, but her training wouldn't allow her to accept the plan of 'one person charging alone into an unknown environment.'
"Then what do you plan to do?"
"Go and fish them out."
"Alone?"
"One person is enough."
Daisy swallowed the words at the tip of her tongue. She had been around this man long enough to know that this wasn't just bravado.
Wanda stood up straight from the sofa, red light flashing briefly at her fingertips.
"I'm going with you."
"You stay," Arthur said without looking back. "Your Chaos Magic is too sensitive to dimensional fluctuations. Once you go down, your perception will be completely overwhelmed; you won't be able to help, and instead, you'll become a target."
Wanda clenched her hand, and the red light went out. She didn't argue.
Pietro leaned against the wall, rubbing the bruise from where he'd been repelled earlier, muttering, "I'm fast."
Seeing the look Arthur swept toward him, he swallowed the remaining words.
Arthur held his staff upright.
"The barrier will last until I return." He glanced at Daisy. "If anything happens, use this to contact me."
A blue rune the size of a fingernail flicked from his fingertip, attaching to the back of Daisy's phone and embedding itself into the plastic case. it flashed once, then went dark.
Daisy flipped her phone to look at the new marking, then looked up.
"Be careful."
"Mages don't rely on being careful."
The staff thudded against the floor. A second time.
This time there was no magic circle, no chanting, and no extra movements.
The Arcane Mark spread from his palm across his entire arm, a ghostly blue light rising to the skin's surface along the veins, and the gem at the top of the staff lit up.
Teleportation.
High-dimensional coordinate anchoring, spatial folding, instantaneous displacement. It was a completely different beast from the cheap stuff that just draws a circle to open a door.
Blue light surged from beneath his feet, swallowing his entire body.
The light was so bright that everyone present closed their eyes for a moment.
When they opened them again, the spot where Arthurhad stood held only a small patch of blue afterglow dissipating in the air. A scorch mark left by the final Arcaneradiation of the Teleportation remained on the floor, etched into the tile.
The living room fell silent.
Wanda stood in place, hands at her sides. Daisy gripped her phone. Pietro leaned against the wall.
From under the coffee table, Loki Goat rested his head on his front hooves, his golden vertical pupils staring at the scorch mark for three seconds before his ears flattened back, and he remained silent.
Outside the window, the aurora continued to expand.
New York State. One thousand and thirty-seven meters underground.
Hellfire Club Hidden Base. Main Hall.
Three Infrasonic Mutant Gene Suppressors were working simultaneously, filling every inch of space with low-frequency pulses. They were invisible to the naked eye, but they made one's scalp tingle.
Emma Frost knelt in the center of the main hall.
Her White combat suit was mostly shredded, and she could no longer maintain her Diamond Form. The last piece of crystal peeled off her right forearm, revealing the skin beneath, where blood and sweat flowed together.
Three days.
Seventy-two hours since the internal coup began.
She had killed twenty-three rebels and wounded over forty others before finally being driven back to the main hall by the crossfire of five suppressors. Telepathy: zero. Diamond Form: zero.
An Omega-level Mutant had been stripped down to a mortal.
The Rebel Leader stood five meters in front of her. His black mech mask flipped up, revealing a scarred face. He held an Energy rifle, its muzzle glowing with a ghostly blue light.
"White Queen." His tone held a hint of regret, but more excitement. "You look much better kneeling than you do sitting on a throne."
Behind him, the locking sounds of weapons from hundreds of heavy mechs merged into one, and dense red aiming dots fell upon her body.
Emma looked up.
The blood at the corner of her mouth hadn't dried yet. She heard those words, and the corner of her mouth twitched, pulling at her dry, cracked wounds and causing new beads of blood to seep out.
She squeezed out her remaining mental energy, crying out in all directions just as she had three days ago.
No one answered.
No one would answer.
Then, the dome overhead let out a creak.
It wasn't the creak of a mechanical failure, nor the creak of aging metal.
It was the sound of something from the outside, forcibly prying open a gap through a thousand and thirty-seven meters of rock and steel plate.
The Rebel Leader looked up.
The aiming systems of hundreds of mechs shifted simultaneously, the red dots moving away from Emma to lock onto the ceiling.
In the very center of the dome, a blue point of light the size of a fist was expanding.
Chapter 70: The White Queen's Desperate Situation
By the time the blue speck of light in the center of the dome expanded to the size of a washbasin, the Rebel Leader was no longer looking at Emma.
"Turn everything! Aim at that thing!"
The weapon systems of hundreds of mechas completed their redirection within half a second, their red targeting dots converging into a single spot of light pinned onto the expanding glow on the dome.
The Rebel Leader took three steps back, raising his energy rifle, the muzzle following the light.
He didn't know what it was.
But something that could make a three-meter-thick reinforced dome groan from outside a thousand meters of rock strata wasn't coming over for a social visit.
"Increase the suppressor power!"
Three Infrasonic Mutant Gene Suppressors overloaded simultaneously, doubling the intensity of the low-frequency pulses. Everyone's eardrums in the main hall began to buzz.
At this power level, even if Professor X himself stood here, he would be nothing more than an ordinary old man in a wheelchair.
Emma knelt in the center of a pool of blood and looked up.
That glow didn't have the characteristics of Mutant energy; it wasn't within the spectrum of any superpower she recognized.
Hope had already been dead in her heart for three days.
Yet her pupils tracked the light. Her body was more honest than her consciousness.
The Rebel Leader didn't have the patience to wait any longer.
"Fire!"
Energy cannons and ballistic weapons poured out simultaneously. Hundreds of beams and trajectories merged into a searing pillar, slamming into the dome. Explosions. Smoke and dust. Metal fragments melted under the high temperature, then hardened into slag as they cooled, clattering down.
The firepower lasted for a full four seconds.
When the smoke cleared, the light on the dome had not diminished.
It was laughing.
Of course, it wasn't actually laughing. But the speed and rhythm of its expansion were unhurried, waiting, waiting for all the ammunition to be spent.
Then, it moved.
The light transformed from a dot into a cylinder, crashing down from the dome. The steel bars and concrete of the dome didn't shatter the moment the pillar of light touched them.
They froze.
Starting from the point of contact, white ice crystals spread in all directions along the dome's structure at a visible speed. The temperature plummeted, and the coating on the steel bars contracted and cracked under the low temperature, emitting a dense series of crisp snaps.
Within three seconds, the entire dome had turned into a massive ice cap.
Then, it shattered.
The dome, made brittle by the cold, collapsed under its own weight. Tens of thousands of ice chunks fell from above—some as wide as a tabletop, others as small as a fist—shrouded in bone-chilling cold and fragments of shattered steel.
The rebels instinctively covered their heads and crouched down.
The ice chunks didn't hit a single mecha.
Nor did they hit Emma.
All the shattered ice stopped uniformly two meters above the ground. Suspended in mid-air, fine runes flowed across their surfaces.
Every piece of ice turned into an ice-blue lamp, illuminating the entire main hall.
Emma knelt in the light, her head tilted back. The chill from the shattered ice brushed against her face, freezing the dried blood until it became brittle.
A person stood in the center of the light pillar.
No.
Floating there.
A staff was held vertically in his right hand, its Base three meters above the floor. The rune mark on his wrist was so bright it cast a solid shadow in the air.
Arcane auras radiated outward from his body in ring after ring, their frequency ancient, not belonging to this Universe.
The light pillar's Impact was still spreading.
It touched the nearest suppressor.
A machine worth ten million dollars. Cutting-edge technology. Specifically designed to strip Mutants of all their power.
The moment the Impact touched the casing, all internal circuits overloaded. The metal molecules forming the circuits lost their conductivity upon contact with that energy—the low temperature had ruined the superconducting structure at its core.
The first suppressor went dark.
The second one.
The third one.
The buzzing sound vanished.
The main hall suddenly became quiet, so quiet that one could hear the rustling flow of runes on the floating ice.
The Base's smart AI screamed on all channels simultaneously.
"Warning. High-energy reaction from an unknown dimension has invaded. Mutant suppression field declared neutralized."
"Repeat: All three Infrasonic Mutant Gene Suppressors have ceased operation. Reason: Unknown. Invading energy does not belong to any known Mutant gene spectrum. Does not belong to any known cosmic ray spectrum. Does not belong to any known superpower classification system."
"Unable to classify. Unable to analyze. Immediate withdr—"
The AI's voice cut off.
The copper in the power lines had been frozen until it lost its ductility and snapped.
The Rebel Leader's hands were shaking. The muzzle of his energy rifle moved away from that floating figure, then back, then away again.
He had experienced battles with Mutants and knew the level of Alpha and Omega-class ability users.
But he had never seen a person just stand there, doing nothing, and freeze an entire defense system into uselessness on a physical level.
"What... what are you?"
Arthur looked down at him.
His gaze swept across the Rebel Leader's face, across the hundreds of mechas behind him, across Emma kneeling on the ground, and across her shredded combat suit and the crisscrossing wounds on her body.
He paused for a beat on Emma.
And looked away.
The staff turned half a circle in his hand, Base pointing down, and he began to descend. His speed was very slow, leisurely enough to give everyone present ample time to see the expression on his face.
There was no anger. No killing intent.
Only disdain.
Pure, undisguised disdain.
His feet stopped a meter above the ground, his gaze scanning horizontally. The floating ice fragments arranged themselves into a geometric array behind him, the light from the runes hitting his back and outlining two symmetrical arcs.
Arthur spoke.
He didn't shout, but everyone in the main hall heard him. The sound waves were carried by Arcane laws into the cockpit of every mecha, including those pilots whose hands were hovering over the emergency ejection buttons.
"Hundreds of grown men using scrap metal to bully a woman."
He glanced at the Hellfire Club flag hanging on the wall. The emblem of flames and a crown was half-stained with blood.
"Your conduct is more disgusting than a goblin's."
No one in the main hall spoke.
No one moved.
The Rebel Leader's lips twitched twice, and his muzzle finally settled on Arthur's chest. His thumb flicked off the safety of the energy rifle.
Emma knelt on the ground, staring at the back of the figure floating in the air.
Her Telepathy was recovering. With the suppressors gone, the awakening of her x-gene would only take a few seconds.
She tried to extend a mental tentacle to touch the surface of that person's mind.
She was bounced back.
It wasn't a barrier, or a firewall, or any mental defense she had ever seen.
It was depth.
The things inside that person's mind were so deep that her perception couldn't find the bottom after entering; she couldn't even see the boundaries. Vast, cold laws that completely did not belong to this World operated in that abyss. Her mental tentacle was automatically judged as 'unauthorized' in the face of those laws, and it even carried a faint backlash when it bounced back.
Emma let out a muffled groan.
Blood seeped from the corner of her mouth.
Her fingers clenched against the ground.
That person was not a Mutant.
She couldn't read anything.
The Rebel Leader pulled the trigger.
Chapter 71: That's Technology, I'm magic
The energy beam traveled from the muzzle to the target, a distance of five meters, in less than 0.03 seconds.
Arthur didn't dodge.
The blue-white energy beam hit his chest—to be precise, it hit a spot three centimeters in front of his chest. The Mana Shield didn't even ripple. The energy beam spread into a flat flower of light on the contact surface, sliding along the curved surface of the shield to both sides before eventually bleeding off past his shoulders, melting two small pits into the shattered ice behind him.
The Rebel Leader's finger was still pressed against the trigger.
Arthur looked down at his chest, as if checking to see if his clothes had caught any dust.
"Aim better next time. You missed."
The Rebel Leader took a step back. His heel landed precisely on a seam in the metal floor, beneath which was buried an emergency activation switch. He had calculated the distance; every step had an escape route.
He pressed down hard with his heel.
A dull sound of machinery operating came from deep beneath the floor.
The walls in the four corners of the main hall split open simultaneously, and four infrasonic generators, two sizes larger than the previous ones, rose from hidden compartments. Their casings were coated in orange warning paint, with 'BACKUP' printed in capital letters alongside a string of Russian model numbers.
Backup units.
Their power was three times that of the main units.
The Rebel Leader's voice was trembling, but his words were harsh. "I don't care where you're from, a Mutant is a Mutant! Lock down your genes! Full power!"
The four backup Suppressors started up simultaneously.
This time it was no longer a hum, but tangible sound pressure. The infrasonic pulses visibly transformed into circles of blue ripples, grinding in from four directions at once. The air was compressed into a solid, and even the floating ice shards trembled.
Everyone's eardrums in the main hall were aching.
Emma closed her eyes.
She knew the principles of such machines all too well. With the backup units at triple power, x-gene expression would be forcibly shut down at the chromosomal level. Erased directly. Even in her peak Diamond Form, she could only maintain it for less than two seconds against this level of power.
No matter how strong the person who came to save her was, as long as he was a Mutant...
The blue ripples ground over Arthur's body.
Sweeping from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.
Then sweeping back from his feet to his head.
The full power output of the four machines made a complete pass over him.
Arthur stood where he was.
The cluster of Arcane sparks hovering at his fingertips hadn't changed color, brightness, or flickering frequency. It was even a bit steadier than before, as if the infrasonic waves had given it a massage.
The entire hall fell silent for two seconds.
Two seconds was a long time in such a situation. Long enough for the Rebel Leader's muzzle to start drooping, and long enough for the hand of the nearest mecha pilot to slip off the weapon control lever.
Arthur cracked his neck with a crisp sound.
"Do you have some kind of misunderstanding about power?"
He raised his left hand and spread his fingers. Blue points of light lit up simultaneously at the tips of his five fingers, each point operating independently at a different frequency.
"Your Suppressors target the x-gene. Genetic mutations. Things at the chromosomal level."
The points of light converged in his palm, condensing into an ice-blue sphere the size of a fist. Flowing across the sphere's surface were the same kind of runes Arthur had carved onto his wrist the first day he had crossed over.
"But I am not a Mutant."
The sphere's temperature was dropping. Water molecules in the air formed a thin shell of ice around it, which was then evaporated by the heat of the runes, only to freeze again and evaporate once more in an endless cycle.
"I use mana."
"It's not governed by Darwin."
The Rebel Leader's pupils constricted. He wanted to fire another shot, and his finger was already on the trigger.
He failed to pull it.
He looked down.
An ice-blue spike had pierced through the entire armor of his right shoulder, entering through the chest and exiting through the back, its end pinned more than fifteen centimeters deep into the alloy wall behind him.
Frostbolt.
The blue sphere in Arthur's right hand was gone. From condensation to firing to impact, the entire process had taken less than 0.4 seconds. While the Rebel Leader's mind was still stuck on the fact that he wasn't a Mutant, his body had already been pinned to the wall.
Ice began to spread from the point of penetration. Thermal motion at the molecular level was locked down. The coating on the armor's surface contracted, cracked, and peeled off under the extreme low temperature, revealing the metal skeleton underneath. Within half a second, the skeleton became brittle and shattered.
The Rebel Leader wanted to scream, but his vocal cords were frozen. The expression on his face was frozen in a half-formed state of terror, unable to even finish a single word.
An ice sculpture.
The main hall was silent for less than a second.
"Fire!"
It was unclear which mecha pilot shouted first. Panic spread faster than orders. The weapon systems of hundreds of mechas simultaneously disengaged their locks, switched targets, and fired.
Energy cannons. Kinetic armor-piercing rounds. Plasma beams. Miniature guided missiles.
All firepower poured toward one person.
Arthur didn't retreat. He didn't dodge. He didn't even raise his staff.
Mana Shield.
All-encompassing.
A blue light membrane expanded from his body's surface into a spherical zone with a one-meter radius. The moment any incoming ammunition touched the membrane, its kinetic energy dropped to zero. The energy cannon beams refracted off the shield's surface, shooting toward the ceiling and walls, instead causing collateral damage within the rebels' own ranks.
Two mechas were hit by the refracted energy from their allies and toppled over, emitting smoke.
The barrage lasted for a full six seconds. After six seconds, the first batch of mechas to fire ran out of ammunition, and their automatic loading systems kicked in, mechanical arms rummaging through the magazines for spare rounds.
The smoke and dust cleared.
Arthur stood where he was.
A bit of dust had settled on the tops of his shoes. He glanced down, tapped his staff on the ground, and a circle of miniature wind pressure blew the dust away.
Then he started walking.
Walking forward.
Not fast. Step by step, his feet landed on the shattered metal floor, the blue light of the Mana Shield moving with him. Every time he passed a mecha, its pilot would shrink back into their seat.
A few mechas fired another round as he passed by.
The barrage hit the shield, but it didn't even affect the rhythm of Arthur's stride.
Emma knelt in a pool of blood, her head tilted back, watching this man walk through the gunfire.
Her telepathy was recovering. Now that the Suppressors were useless, her x-gene was re-expressing itself, and mental energy was seeping back bit by bit from the parched ravines of her mind.
That man was taking a stroll through a crossfire of hundreds of mechas.
She had lived for twenty-eight years. She had seen Professor X paralyze the consciousness of an entire city in the Cerebro chamber. She had seen Magneto lift a stadium. She had seen Jean Grey disintegrate matter under the power of the Phoenix Force.
She had never seen this.
Those Suppressors, mechas, and energy cannons were things of a completely different level before this man. They couldn't hit him, they couldn't touch him, and they couldn't even earn a single notch of his attention.
Her mental tentacles reached out again.
It was an instinct developed over twenty years. Faced with any unknown powerhouse, her first reaction was to read—read motives, read weaknesses, read fears. This was the foundation of her survival in the Hellfire Club.
Her mental tentacles touched the surface of the man's brain.
They bounced back.
When they had bounced back last time, she could still sense some depth. This time, there was nothing. Her perceptual ability was automatically downgraded to zero in front of that thing.
It couldn't be measured. It couldn't be reached. She couldn't even see a projection of its boundaries.
Blood seeped from the corner of her mouth again. A ringing in her ears poured in from her temples, spreading along the back of her head to her entire cranial cavity.
Arthur paused for a step amidst the gunfire.
He turned his head and glanced at her.
He saw it.
That gaze wasn't exactly cold, but the message within was clear: I know what you're doing. First time, last time.
Emma's mental tentacles retracted.
She lowered her head.
There was something in that gaze she had never seen on anyone's face before.
Indifference.
Between his mana and her x-gene lay an entire system of rules, and they couldn't even find a point of intersection.
A gap between two species.
Arthur withdrew his gaze and continued walking forward.
There were over three hundred mechas left. The four backup Suppressors were idling in the corners, completely meaningless to him.
The water level of his mana pool dropped by a small notch. The passive consumption of the Mana Shield wasn't much, but he noticed it.
The efficiency was too low.
He needed to change his approach.
He spun his staff half a turn in his hand, pointing the tip forward.
The Arcane spark at his fingertips changed color.
From ice-blue to dark red.
Chapter 72: The Queen's Shock and Awe
Dark red light spread from the tip of the staff down the entire length of its body.
The mana pool was at seventy percent capacity. It was enough.
Arthur stopped in his tracks, holding the staff level as the tip traced an arc less than thirty centimeters wide.
Flame Storm. Centered on himself.
Fire grew out from the gaps between air molecules. Every oxygen molecule became fuel, every nitrogen molecule became an accelerant; space itself was the source of the fire.
Crimson erupted from beneath his feet, expanding in all directions at a speed of twelve meters per second.
The armored shells of the first row of mechs turned red, then white, then transparent. Temperatures exceeding three thousand degrees pierced through six-centimeter-thick composite armor plates in half a second. The electronic circuits, hydraulic pipes, and the pilot's pressure suit inside melted away in sequence according to their melting points.
There was no explosion. The temperature was too high; there wasn't even enough time for a chemical reaction. They vaporized instantly.
The second row. The third row.
Where the wall of fire pushed through, only puddles of bubbling silver liquid metal remained.
Seven seconds.
From casting to completion, seven seconds. Two-thirds of the area in front of the main hall was cleared. The floor had turned into a massive mirror, reflecting light off the condensed metal.
The remaining mechs were squeezed into the corner at the back of the main hall, their firing lanes blocked by the wreckage of their own kind. Pilots were frantically slapping ejection buttons or pushing at hatch doors; a whole group of them knelt with their hands over their heads.
The fire receded.
The staff thudded against the ground.
One second ago, he had stood in the center of a firing network from hundreds of mechs; one second later, he stood amidst a field of metallic ruins, his clothes not even wrinkled.
He looked down at Emma, who was kneeling on the ground.
"Your Majesty."
Emma's spine stiffened.
"Snooping into other people's minds without permission... in my hometown, that gets you turned into a sheep."
He paused for a moment.
"Literally. The fluffy kind. One that goes 'baa'."
Emma knelt in a pool of blood. Three days of injuries, three days of bleeding, three days without closing her eyes. Her blonde hair was clumped into strands, sticking to her neck.
But she managed a small smile.
It wasn't the standard social smile calibrated to every muscle. It was an uncontrollable twitch of the corner of her mouth that tugged at her parched wounds, causing new beads of blood to seep out.
"Lord Mage... thank you."
She braced her hands on her knees to stand up. Her right lower leg had an open fracture; she got halfway up before kneeling back down, her knee hitting the metal floor with a dull thud.
Arthur extended his staff horizontally. "Lean on it."
Emma reached out and gripped the middle of the staff. A crisp, refreshing chill poured from her palm, traveling along her arm and through her entire body. Her sensation of pain was temporarily sealed away; even the fracture site stopped sending signals.
She stood steady.
The rest of her sentence was buried by the sound of impacts coming from deep within the Base.
It was metallic, heavy, and rhythmic. One. Two. Three. Each strike was louder than the last.
The reinforced blast door embedded in the rock wall at the deepest part of the main hall began to deform from the inside. A hemispherical bulge swelled in the center of the door panel, its coating cracking apart.
The fourth strike.
The blast door was torn open from the middle.
The howling arrived first. It was low enough to vibrate the chest and internal organs, yet high enough to pierce the eardrums—two extremes layered together.
Then came the smell. The rank stench of Beast, mixed with chemical agents and something that only existed in Arthur's memories—Fel remnants.
An old friend from Azeroth hadn't stayed idle even in this Universe.
The first one to charge out of the torn blast door stood two point three meters tall at the shoulder. Deformed muscle tissue bulged under gray fur, bony spikes grew from its spine, and two dark green artificial crystals were stuffed into its eye sockets.
The second one. The fifth. The tenth.
"How many?"
Emma's telepathy had mostly recovered. After the Suppressor was ruined, her x-gene expressed itself once more, and mental energy seeped back from her parched mental pathways. Her perception probed behind the blast door, sweeping through the two-hundred-meter-long corridor, completing the count in three seconds.
"Thirty-seven. There are also one hundred and twenty mechs on standby at the end of the corridor. That's forty percent more than the intelligence gathered before the rebellion; someone had hidden these trump cards in advance."
Being able to calmly analyze troop deployment under such circumstances—she truly was someone who had spent ten years soaking in the power meat-grinder.
The pack of giant wolves did not slow down. The thirty-seven of them formed a wedge formation, pouring toward the main hall with the momentum of a charging truck.
Arthur landed on the ground, two steps away from Emma.
"Activate your Diamond Form."
Emma's expression shifted. The corner of her mouth pulled down for a moment before she caught herself; she was fast, but not fast enough to hide it completely.
"Lord Mage, I would very much like to."
She tilted her head to glance at the four corners of the main hall. The indicator lights on the four backup Suppressors were still flashing.
She opened her hand. On her palm, the patterns of diamond crystallization flickered for a moment and then died out; she couldn't connect.
"I can't transform."
The giant wolf pack was six seconds away from the entrance of the main hall. The floor was vibrating, and ice shards were jumping.
Arthur looked at her empty palm, then glanced at the Suppressors in the four corners.
"Who told you those things could keep running?"
The staff thudded against the ground.
This time was different. It wasn't a coordinate anchor, it wasn't a barrier expansion, and it wasn't an offensive spell.
It was a declaration.
"By my side, I define the rules."
Purple.
The moment the halo blossomed from the Base of the staff, the color was no longer blue. Arthur's standard spells all operated within the blue spectrum—ice blue, ghostly blue, indigo. Purple was a color that only appeared when mana density was compressed until the spectrum itself was distorted.
The Arcane Aura expanded at a steady rate.
It touched the first Suppressor.
All the indicator lights on the orange shell flared brilliantly for an instant—then went dark. It wasn't a power cut. Every internal electronic component was simultaneously fried, the solder lost its conductive structure, and the silicon crystals in the chips were rearranged into an insulator that did not exist in nature.
On a physical level. Complete. Irreversible. Scrapped.
The second. The third. The fourth.
Sparks flew, and a series of crisp snaps echoed from inside the casings as precision parts were being rewritten at the molecular level.
The humming disappeared.
Completely gone.
The shackles that had suppressed her for three days were gone.
Emma's x-gene fully resumed expression in that same second. Power that had been suppressed for seventy-two hours surged out from her genetic sequence.
Diamond began at her fingertips. It spread along the back of her hand to her wrist, up her forearm, covered her shoulders, crawled up her neck, and swallowed her face. Every inch of skin, every strand of hair, every cell transformed into an organic crystal three times harder than natural diamond.
Light refracted off her body into dozens of colored lines.
She clenched her fist. The crystals at the joints clicked into place.
Three days.
She hadn't felt this sense of security for three days.
The pack of giant wolves charged into the main hall. The leader leaped, a dark green Fel glow shining between its three rows of steel teeth.
Arthur stood his ground.
Emma stood beside him.
"Lord Mage."
"Yes."
"By your side, the rules are indeed a bit different."
Deep in the corridor behind the blast door, the engines of one hundred and twenty mechs ignited simultaneously, the roar traveling across the two-hundred-meter distance to mingle with the howling of the giant wolves.
Arthur glanced at the wolves pouncing from all over the hall, then at the iridescent diamond woman beside him.
He placed his palm on her shoulder.
Frost mana surged from his palm, pouring into the diamond lattice structure.
Emma shuddered.
"Lord Mage, what are you do—"
"Don't move."
Chapter 73: Ice Crystal Queen
The moment the frost poured into her palm, Emma's first reaction was to pull her hand away.
Twenty-eight years of instinct. She didn't allow anyone to perform unauthorized modifications on her, no matter who they were.
She held back.
The feeling of entering the diamond lattice was completely different from what she had expected.
The lattice structures were originally independent and closed; light refracted within, heat stayed out, and kinetic energy was dissipated. Arthur's mana didn't force open those nano-scale gaps; it threaded through the seams, solidifying in every void, connecting the originally scattered lattice units into a single, unified conductor.
Emma raised her hand.
Her fingers curled, and her joints clicked. The sound was different from before; previously, it was the grinding of crystals, but now it was something deeper tightening.
She felt the temperature.
Not cold, but the power of "Cold." The difference between those two words was the gap between describing a sensation and truly grasping a law.
"Does 'don't move' mean don't think, or don't breathe?"
"Don't use your own will to resist the injected mana." Arthur pushed the magnitude in his palm up another notch. "Your lattice has its own orientation and will repel foreign energy. Let go, let it flow on its own."
Emma suppressed the desire for control she had held for twenty-eight years.
Let go.
Ice blue began to flow through her entire Diamond Formsimultaneously, from fingertips to palm, from palm to forearm, spreading across her shoulders, down her spine, and finally covering every inch of the crystalline surface.
Arthur released his hand and took a step back.
Emma looked down.
Diamond Form was originally colorless; the color it refracted depended on the light source. Now, she was glowing from within—an ice blue identical to the color of Arthur's magic, flowing along the lattice patterns and forming intricate designs on the surface.
She clenched her fist, sensing something beyond diamond hardness.
From the Zero-Degree Force Field radiating outward from her body, the moisture in the air within a three-meter radius was rapidly desublimating.
"You've turned me into a Frost Generator."
"A Frost Conductor." Arthur had already turned around, looking at the wolf pack swarming from the gate and the engine lights of the hundred and twenty mechas deep in the corridor. "Your hardness is the raw material, my mana is the fuel, and you are the one outputting the firepower."
"Reasonable."
Emma swallowed her remaining three-point evaluation.
She took the first step.
The lead Mutant Giant Wolf leaped, its three rows of steel teeth snapping toward her throat.
She reached out her right hand, fingers splayed, meeting it.
The giant wolf's lower jaw locked onto her palm. Its bite force was enough to crush steel plates, but it made no sound against the diamond. The ice blue between her fingers seeped into the contact surface, freezing it at a speed more than an order of magnitude faster than a typical frost weapon—expanding from within the cellular structure, bones snapping from the extreme cold, and steel teeth cracking like ice.
Three seconds, a frozen wolf.
No blood. It was too cold; even the blood didn't have time to flow.
Emma threw the ice sculpture aside, sweeping away two others running behind her; all three shattered together.
The second row of the wolf pack realized something was wrong and began to scatter.
Emma didn't pursue. She walked to the center of the main hall and raised her right arm. Ice blue radiated from her body surface. Due to the combined effect of lattice refraction and energy transmission, the radiation wasn't spherical; instead, a narrow line extended toward every moving heat source.
Thirty-four lines. One for each Mutant Giant Wolf.
Arthur raised his left hand behind her.
A Flame Storm rose from the gaps in the floor, spreading out according to the distribution of the mecha group. This underground space had activated a large amount of dormant magic elements due to the dimensional collision; fire elements were particularly active, and a little guidance could mobilize a vast area.
Left, Fire.
Right, ice.
Two forces expanded simultaneously from both sides of the main hall, not intersecting, each managing its own area, separated by an invisible straight line. The two hadn't exchanged a word or a glance, yet their zones were clearly defined and their coverage was tight.
The sound of the mecha group melting in the flames intertwined with the crisp snapping of the Mutant wolf pack being frozen.
The hundred and twenty standby mechas in the corridor rushed into the main hall, stepping over the molten iron that had already begun to solidify. Their thermal sensors all turned bright red. Half of them judged the current environment unsuitable for combat the moment they entered and automatically triggered retreat protocols. However, during the command transmission, the control systems began to misreport due to overheating, and the retreat turned into spinning in place.
Arthur glanced at them, didn't use any new magic, and withdrew his hand, letting the already deployed Flame Storm run on its own.
Temperature difference.
At the boundary where the extremely hot and extremely cold zones were forced together, the air expanded and contracted violently. The physical effect of thermal expansion and contraction was amplified dozens of times in the enclosed space.
That line began to vibrate.
Emma noticed it and instinctively took two steps back, the ice blue withdrawing toward herself.
Arthur didn't move.
"Three seconds."
When Emma counted to two, an Arcane Barrier expanded from Arthur's body, enveloping her.
In the third second, that temperature boundary line exploded.
Two extreme temperatures collapsed toward the center point at the boundary simultaneously, and an Impactdiffused equally in all directions. Mecha shells imploded in the Impact, steel plates were compressed into spheres from the outside, and then torn open from the inside by the pressure difference. The giant wolf ice sculptures turned into powder, leaving not even the shape of bones. The remaining rebels were lifted by the air blast and pinned to the walls.
Dust and smoke obscured the entire main hall for about five seconds.
Arthur withdrew the barrier.
Emma looked at the ruins before her.
Magneto lifting a stadium was a display of power.
This wasn't. This was an equation. Using physical laws to clear an enclosed space, cleanly and thoroughly, without a single speck of dust falling on her.
"How many rebels are left?" Arthur didn't look back.
Emma's Telepathy swept out, detecting chaotic wills to survive and a large number of neural signals in a state of shock.
"No more than twenty capable of fighting." She paused. "They've activated the Base's self-destruct sequence."
Arthur turned around.
"Nuclear Reactor?"
"Nuclear Fusion. The Main Control Room is forty meters below us. The countdown has already started. From the signal... two minutes."
Emma's voice was kept very level, but she couldn't suppress the next sentence:
"A full-power detonation is enough to turn everything within a three-kilometer radius on the surface into glass."
Arthur looked at the floor beneath his feet. Forty meters, separated by two layers of reinforced concrete, a layer of cooling water pipes, and a disaster-level energy pack.
"Can you teleport down?"
"No need."
Before Emma could ask anything else, Arthur had already planted his staff on the ground.
He actively let go of it.
His hands circled his waist, palms up. The casting anchors were removed, and all mana was retracted into his body—this was to directly receive something with flesh and blood without any buffer.
Blue light shone from beneath his skin, following the path of his blood vessels throughout his body, slower and deeper than any previous casting action.
Emma's Telepathy touched it and then actively withdrew. The frequency was wrong; forced contact would only cause a secondary backlash.
She could only watch with her eyes.
A tiny blue-black sphere appeared in Arthur's palm. Its radius was no more than five centimeters, but the air around it was bending, and even the ice-blue light radiating from Emma was involuntarily tilting toward it.
Forty meters below, a white light shone through the gaps in the floor.
It didn't belong to frost, nor did it belong to fire.
The light of Nuclear Fusion before criticality.
The sphere approached the floor.
White light surged up from the gaps, and the moment it touched the sphere, its direction changed.
Not diffusing, but converging.
The white light was swallowed into the sphere, its surface remaining calm. Three kilometers' worth of destructive yield was disappearing into something the size of a fist.
Emma's hair fluttered toward it, and the residual ice blue between her fingers also flowed uncontrollably in that direction.
It lasted for about thirty seconds.
The white light was gone.
Arthur withdrew his hands, and the sphere disappeared into his palm.
He burped.
Emma stared at him for two seconds.
"You just absorbed the energy of a nuclear explosion?"
"Yeah, I'm a bit stuffed." He flexed his fingers; after a mana overload, his extremities would feel numb. "Next time, tell them to lower the yield a bit."
No one moved in the ruins.
Not even the remaining rebels.
Emma stood in the center of the main hall. Her Diamond Form was fading, her skin turning from crystal back to flesh inch by inch, and the pain from her wounds surged back. Three days of fatigue and seventy-two hours of continuous fighting and suppression now weighed on her shoulders.
Her knees buckled slightly.
She forced them straight.
Walking to Arthur, stepping over ruins and iron scraps, her high heels made a clear, crisp sound on the ground.
Her footing was steady.
She knelt on one knee; it was her own choice.
Not because her knees were weak.
"Emma Frost," she looked up at him. "At your service, My Lord."
Arthur glanced at her, placed his finger on her chin, and gently tilted it up.
He didn't speak.
A blue notification box popped up in the upper right corner of his vision on the system panel:
[Fusion Skill Unlocked: Diamond Ice Crystal Form (First Creation)]
[X-Men Universe Integration Progress: 30%]
[New Mutant coordinates established globally]
[Warning: Westchester County abnormal space construction complete, unknown Omega-level Telepathyhas activated Area Blockade.]
Arthur closed the panel. After a half-second pause, he withdrew his hand.
"Get up, the floor is dirty."
He picked up his staff and glanced at her.
"Let's go."
The blue light of Teleportation swallowed both of them simultaneously.
---
When they landed in the New York apartment, Wandawas standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window with her back to the door.
The Aurora outside had spread across half the sky, with emerald green and rose red dyeing the New York night sky the color of another Universe.
She heard the residue of the Teleportation behind her but didn't turn around.
"You're back."
"Yeah."
"You brought someone back."
It wasn't a question.
Arthur didn't explain. Wanda's magic Perception of Chaos Magic didn't need eyes—the person who followed half a step behind Arthur still carried the residual warmth of ice blue and diamond crystals; she was the coldest thing Wanda had ever sensed.
Wanda turned around.
Blonde hair, blue eyes, her combat suit mostly in tatters, with undried blood on her face, she stood there with an aura that didn't fit the apartment at all.
The two of them stared at each other for three seconds.
A red light flickered at Wanda's fingertips.
Emma's lips moved slightly as she scanned Wanda from head to toe, finally pausing for two seconds on that red light.
"Chaos Magic. Omega-level. Potential without a ceiling."
Wanda's red light brightened another notch.
"You read me."
"Just sensing, not intruding. You can tell the difference." Emma withdrew her gaze. "Your ability is very sensitive."
Whether it was a compliment or a warning, only the speaker knew.
Wanda didn't lower her hand; the red light at her fingertips floated in the darkness, steady.
Arthur walked to the kitchen and plugged in the kettle.
Behind him, the silence between the two women grew tighter and tighter, so tight that the Loki Goat in the corner of the sofa flattened its ears and quietly shrank under the coffee table, its marshmallow-like body squeezing in until only two eyes remained outside.
Pietro poked half a head out from the bedroom door, looked at Wanda, then at the blonde woman, and then at Arthur's back.
Then he pulled back and closed the door.
A sentence leaked through the crack of the door:
"I'm not home."
The water in the kettle began to rumble.
Arthur didn't look back.
"Everyone, come in and sit."
Outside the window, the Aurora was still expanding. The layer of gray noise over New York flickered once, disappeared, then reappeared, a circle larger than before.
Chapter 74: The Era of Great Convergence
The blue light of the teleportation faded, leaving a faint circle of ice-blue burn marks on the apartment floor.
The kettle began to whistle in the kitchen.
Arthur took three cups out of the cabinet, paused for a moment, and then took out a fourth.
Four cups of hot water were placed on the coffee table, steam rising from them.
Wanda sat on the left end of the sofa; the red light at her fingertips had vanished, but she didn't put her hands back on her knees.
Emma stood to the right of the sofa, not sitting. Her weight was pressed onto her left leg, her back held perfectly straight; the only thing on her that wasn't broken was her resolve.
There was a two-meter gap between them.
Arthur pushed the cups toward them.
"Drink some water first. You're both dehydrated."
Wanda picked up her cup, her index finger resting on the rim, but she didn't drink.
Emma looked at the cup, then at the lingering red glimmer on Wanda's finger.
"Is this cup mine?"
"The third one."
Arthur pointed.
"The fourth is for Pietro. If he doesn't come out within half an hour, it'll be cold."
A muffled "not thirsty" came from the bedroom doorway.
Emma picked up the cup with her left hand, as her right had not yet been treated.
She took a sip of water; as she swallowed, her shoulder twitched at an angle from the pain, but she didn't make a sound.
Arthur walked over, carrying his staff.
"Hold out your hand."
Emma handed him her right hand.
Arthur's palm lit up, and a blue-green light flowed from her wrist to her forearm. A wave of heat emanated from the fracture as the broken ends accelerated their healing and muscle fibers rearranged themselves.
Wanda watched the held hand, the surface of the water in her cup rippling slightly.
Thirty seconds later, Arthur let go.
"The bone is set. The soft tissue still needs to grow back on its own, so don't use any force for two days."
"Thank you, Mas—"
"Call me by my name at home."
Emma's lips pressed together.
"Thank you, Arthur."
Wanda took a sip of water and set it down, her gaze never leaving Emma.
"Where is she staying?"
She wasn't asking Emma.
"The guest room just needs a bit of tidying up."
"Guest room."
Wanda repeated those two words.
Arthur glanced at her. Wanda's expression was calm—so calm that her fingernails were digging into the leather of the sofa's armrest.
"Wanda."
"Yeah."
"You're using Chaos Magic to read the atmosphere. Turn it off."
Her fingers loosened, leaving five shallow crescents on the armrest.
Emma held her cup, the corner of her mouth curling slightly.
A Telepath ranked in the top three globally didn't need to read minds to decode every layer of this scene.
She chose to remain silent.
The White Queen's greatest strength had never been her attack, but her timing.
Arthur raised his hand and drew a line in the air. The aurora outside the floor-to-ceiling window reflected on the glass, severed into two segments by his finger.
"Everyone go rest. Tomorrow will be very busy."
The aurora outside expanded another notch.
No one slept well.
At 3:00 AM, Arthur stood on the balcony. The vibration frequency of the dimensional wall had doubled over the last six hours. There were sounds of tossing and turning in Wanda's bedroom, while the guest room door remained closed, the interior excessively quiet.
Daisy was curled up on the living room sofa, the only one of the four who was asleep, though she was a light sleeper, her phone clutched in her hand.
The three who weren't sleeping each guarded their own silence.
At 5:17 AM, Daisy's phone vibrated.
She sprang up nearly as fast as Pietro, swiping the screen and staring for three seconds as the color drained from her face.
"Arthur."
Arthur pushed open the balcony door and walked in, holding a cup of coffee.
"I saw it."
"How did you—"
"The aurora outside stopped expanding at 4:23. It didn't dissipate; it stabilized. Its coordinates were anchored from the inside by something."
Daisy handed him the phone.
On the screen was an all-frequency communication Furyhad sent to all Agents, starting with three exclamation points in red font:
[Westchester County, New York. An unidentified complex of buildings appeared overnight. Covers approximately sixty acres. Satellite playback shows the complex appeared out of thin air at 04:23:07 AM, taking no more than 2 seconds. Government satellites, civilian surveillance, and Military radar are unable to explain the mechanism of its appearance. All Agents on standby, Level: ALPHA-1.]
Attached was a satellite screenshot.
Arthur zoomed in on the image.
"A Gothic Manor," Daisy leaned in. "Spires, arched windows, stone walls—it's completely out of place with the surrounding American suburbs. It looks like it was moved wholesale from 19th-century England."
Wanda emerged from the bedroom; she didn't need to look at a phone.
"The dimensional wall closed at those coordinates."
She stood at the entrance of the hallway, her voice still raspy from sleep.
"Two Universes have been stitched together there, clean and sharp."
"Someone anchored the seam there?"
"Yes, the technique was very clean."
Emma walked out of the guest room, having changed into a T-shirt Arthur had found for her, her blonde hair tied back. She lacked the oppressive aura of the White Queen, but the intensity in her eyes hadn't diminished one bit.
"There is a massive mental field around that building. Telepaths below the Alpha-level cannot penetrate it at all."
"Can you?"
"I can, but it would be impolite."
Emma looked at Arthur.
"I've seen the construction method of that field before. Only one person uses it: Charles Xavier."
The living room fell silent for two seconds.
"You know him," Wanda said.
"I knew him in my World."
Emma's phrasing was impeccable.
"The spiritual leader of Mutant society and the World's strongest Telepath. He ran a school to take in Mutantchildren and teach them to control their abilities."
The cup spun once in her hand.
"An idealist. A very stubborn one."
Daisy was still swiping through her phone.
"It's not just Westchester. At least seventeen locations globally saw the simultaneous appearance of unidentified buildings and personnel. A castle in Bavaria, a Militaryfacility in Northern Canada, a hidden village in East Africa..."
"The time?"
"All at 04:23:07, the exact same second."
Arthur set down his coffee cup. All three women looked over at once.
"Feedback from the Arcane Mark shows that the convergence between the X-Men Universe and ours has reached thirty percent."
He gave the cup a slight turn.
"These buildings and people aren't an invasion; they're moving in. The two Universes are stitching together on a physical level, bringing their original territories and residents with them."
"Is it irreversible?" Wanda asked.
"Irreversible."
7:00 AM sharp.
Television signals around the World were hijacked simultaneously.
"The TV," Daisy was the first to notice.
The muted television in the living room jumped to a new image as every channel switched over at once.
The background was a classic study with dark wooden bookshelves, a warm desk lamp, and the morning light peeking through the window.
A man sat in the center of the frame. Wheelchair, bald.
His expression was gentle, but his eyes were deep-set, carrying the exhaustion of a long journey and something even heavier than fatigue.
When he began to speak, the voice didn't come from the television speakers.
It appeared directly in the minds of everyone watching the screen.
Emma's fingers tightened.
"A mental broadcast, completely non-intrusive. Synchronized globally."
She paused.
"He's arrived in this Universe, and cerebro came with him."
"My name is Charles Xavier."
The eyes in the image carried a gentle weariness.
"Many of you do not know who I am. But from today, you need to know one thing."
"Among your neighbors, colleagues, and children, there are some who are born different. Their genes carry something called the x-gene."
"They are Mutants."
"We come from a World parallel to yours. We are not invaders."
"Our home was broken. Fate has stitched the fragments onto your land. We had no choice, and neither did you."
"But we can choose what we do next."
"Mutant brothers and sisters, do not fear."
"Human brothers and sisters... do not fear either."
The broadcast lasted ninety seconds before returning to normal programming.
No one in the living room spoke.
Wanda's hand was pressed against her knee; her perception of Chaos Magic had just been buffeted by that mental broadcast. It wasn't an attack; it was simply—massive.
The man in the wheelchair had a mental reach that was global in scale.
She had never encountered such a volume of power.
The Loki Goat poked its head out from under the coffee table, its vertical pupils staring at the TV screen, ears pricked up.
Daisy's phone rang; it was Fury.
She answered it, but after three seconds, she pulled the phone away from her ear.
Fury's voice exploded from the receiver, clearly audible throughout the entire apartment:
"Who the hell can tell me where this company of people just popped out from?!"
Daisy glanced at Arthur, who shook his head.
"Director, I suggest you sit down first. This might take a long time to explain."
She hung up.
Arthur walked to the floor-to-ceiling window.
The morning Sun gilded the New York skyline; the aurora had vanished, and the sky had returned to its normal blue.
But in his Arcane vision, the noise on the dimensional wall remained. It was increasing, growing denser, filling in piece by piece.
To his left, Wanda stepped up. Her fingertips weren't glowing, but her entire presence was more vivid than any red light.
To his right, Emma approached. Beneath her T-shirt sleeve, diamond crystals flickered on her wrist, where ice-blue Arcane patterns still lingered.
Arthur looked at the reflections of the three of them in the glass and at the New York behind those reflections.
"Professor Charles."
He picked up his coffee cup.
"Welcome to the Era of Great Convergence."
Outside, a S.H.I.E.L.D. Quinjet swept over the apartment, heading toward Westchester County. Then a second, and a third.
The Arcane Mark on his wrist lit up, and a system panel popped up in the corner of his vision with a notification:
[X-Men Universe convergence progress: 31%... 32%... continuing to rise]
[Detected an Omega-level Telepath actively scanning the entire New York area. Your Arcane Mark has automatically masked your location.]
[Note: The target has noticed the existence of the masked area.]
[Additional Warning: The target is attempting to bypass the masking using indirect location methods—Triangulation by reading the memories of all residents surrounding the masked area. Estimated lock-on within 7 minutes.]
Arthur set down his cup.
"The Professor doesn't like having blind spots on his radar."
He tilted his head and glanced at Emma.
"Give him a signal back."
He paused.
"Tell him to come over for a cup of tea when he's free. And while you're at it, have him stop that Triangulation."
Arthur finished the last sip of his coffee.
"Seven minutes isn't enough for him to finish his calculations, but I don't want my neighbors to have a bald tenant living in their heads."
Emma's fingers were already pressed against her temples.
Chapter 75: Tea Party
Emma pressed her fingers to her temples and closed her eyes.
Mental power extended from her sea of consciousness, passing through the apartment walls, through the dense network of neural signals in New York, all the way north.
Westchester County.
The sixty-acre estate was surrounded by a mental force field of extremely high density, its surface so smooth that not a single crack could be found. Emma's mental tentacles paused on the surface of the field for 0.3 seconds, calibrating the frequency and finding an old code known only to her and the other party.
A crack opened in the force field.
She entered.
The estate in the mental space was identical to the physical World. Sunlight streamed through the arched windows, and the air smelled of old wood and aged book pages.
Charles Xavier sat in a wheelchair in the middle of the study, a cup of steaming black tea at his side.
"Emma."
"Charles."
Xavier observed her. The T-shirt, the tied-up hair, and the residual ice-blue patterns on her wrists.
"You've changed your look."
"You've changed your Universe."
Xavier didn't smile. His mental form was more exhausted than any time Emma had ever seen; the cost of maintaining the global broadcast was etched into every wrinkle. But the look in his eyes remained unchanged—gentle, unshakable, habitually seeing through everything.
"Triangulation," Emma said, getting straight to the point. "Has it stopped?"
"It has." Xavier picked up his teacup. "At the same moment you sent the signal. Reading the surface memories of six hundred New Yorkers to locate a shielded area is a crude method; I apologize."
"The person you should apologize to isn't me."
Xavier set the cup down.
"The person in that shielded area. Your new employer?"
Emma's expression didn't flicker. The White Queen's face at a negotiation table was harder than her Diamond Form.
"Protector."
Xavier's eyebrows twitched. It was very slight, but in mental space, this micro-expression was the equivalent of a normal person flipping a table.
"Emma Frost using the word 'protector' to describe someone." He chewed over the words.
"He is not a Mutant," Emma said.
"I noticed. My scan covered all of New York; there was no x-gene signal in that shielded area. But there was something else." Xavier's fingers tapped lightly on the armrest of his wheelchair.
"An energy signature I've never encountered before. Ancient, vast, with a dimensional level higher than the mental form of any telepath I've ever seen."
He paused for a second.
"Including myself."
Those last two words were spoken very slowly. Emmaknew the weight of them. When Charles Xavier said those words, no one on Earth was qualified to interrupt.
But now, things were different.
"He asked me to tell you two things." Emma took a step forward. "First, stop the Triangulation. You've already done that."
"Second?"
"Have a cup of tea when you're free."
Xavier was silent for a full two seconds. In mental space, two seconds was a long time.
Then he laughed. He was truly laughing, unrelated to diplomatic etiquette.
"He has a sense of humor." Xavier pushed the teacup to the other side of the table. "When is convenient?"
"He will decide."
"Good." Xavier's fingers stopped. "Let me ask one more question, Emma."
"Ask."
"Are you safe by his side?"
Emma's mental form skipped a beat.
Twenty-eight years. No one had ever asked her that question. Sebastian Shaw hadn't, and none of the players in the Hellfire Club had. Even for Xavier, it was the first time.
"Safe."
She verified it within her own consciousness. She wasn't lying.
Xavier nodded. Then he said the most important thing of the day.
"Eric is awake."
Emma's mental form tensed up.
"Half an hour ago, a magnetic field signal deep in the Adirondack Mountains activated. I recognize that frequency." Xavier picked up his teacup but didn't drink. "He's coming my way."
"How fast?"
"He's not flying. He's walking." Xavier looked at the tea leaves in his cup. "When Eric chooses to walk on foot, it means he's thinking. A thinking Eric is ten times more dangerous than an angry Eric."
"Does he know about the stitching?"
"He can perceive the magnetic field structure of the entire Earth. The answer is—he knew before I did."
Emma processed this for three seconds.
"Tell your protector," Xavier said, taking back the cup he had pushed across the table. "Don't delay the tea party for too long. My old friend may walk slowly, but he won't wait for anyone to be ready."
The connection broke.
---
Emma opened her eyes.
Arthur was standing by the coffee machine in the kitchen, his back to her.
"He stopped."
"I know. The mark gave feedback." Arthur didn't turn around. "What did he say?"
"He said you have a sense of humor." Emma paused. "He also said one more thing. Magneto is awake and is heading toward Westchester County."
Her choice of words was precise. "Heading toward"—walking.
Wanda set down her teacup on the sofa. "Walking? Not flying?"
"Yes." Emma's tone took on another layer. "In our World, when Erik Lehnsherr walks somewhere, it's not just to travel. It's an inspection. Every nail, every steel beam, every metal skeleton of a car along the way—he perceives them, catalogs them, and remembers them."
"By the time he reaches the gates of Charles's estate, every piece of metal along the entire route is already part of his arsenal."
Pietro came out of the bedroom. This time he didn't lean against the doorframe but sat directly on the dining table.
"Sounds like an old man taking a stroll."
"An old man taking a stroll who can uproot a stadium from its foundations," Emma corrected.
Arthur walked back to the living room with his coffee.
"How long will it take him to reach Westchester?"
Emma did the math. "From the Adirondacks to Westchester, on foot, considering the terrain... a normal person would need five days. Eric will be faster; there are railways along the way, and he can let the tracks help him. Two days. Maybe faster."
"That's enough time."
"Enough for what?" Wanda asked.
Arthur set down his coffee.
"Enough for us to go there first."
The room was silent for two seconds.
"You're going to take the initiative to meet the man in the wheelchair?" Pietro's tone held a hint of surprise.
"He's already trying to guess who I am. Rather than letting an Omega-level telepath piece together a puzzle by guessing, I might as well tell him the answer myself." Arthur glanced at Emma. "As you said, a thinking Eric is more dangerous than an angry one. Let's let Xavier figure out our position before Magneto arrives, so the three-way meeting doesn't turn into a battlefield."
Emma nodded. This was the logic she was familiar with. The first lesson the Hellfire Club's chess games had taught her—always arrive before your opponent makes a move.
Wanda stood up.
"I'm going."
It wasn't a request.
Arthur glanced at her. Wanda's Chaos Magic perception was more accurate than any polygraph when it came to "detecting lies." Taking her to see Xavier was equivalent to bringing along an infallible auditing system.
But he knew that wasn't why Wanda wanted to go.
In Charles Xavier's global broadcast, one word had appeared repeatedly three times—"Mutant." Wanda and Pietro were HYDRA experimental products, not natural-born Mutants. But they weren't sure themselves what exactly the Mind Stone had activated.
She needed answers.
"Fine." Arthur nodded.
"What about me?" Pietro raised his hand.
"You stay and watch the house."
"Watch what house? This apartment has a barrier; not even a fly can get in."
"Watch Loki."
Under the coffee table, the Loki Goat was curled into a ball of white fur, its vertical pupils blinking in the shadows. Hearing its name, its ears flattened further.
Pietro looked down and stared at the sheep for two seconds.
"Fine. Someone has to suffer."
Arthur walked to the window. Arcane vision opened.
There were over a hundred more x-gene signals under the New York skyline than there had been half an hour ago. There was a particularly dense cluster in Midtown Manhattan, likely an entire floor of residents in an apartment building "appearing" simultaneously. Near the Brooklyn Bridge, a signal was moving rapidly beneath the subway tracks.
The new residents of the new World were adapting to their suddenly acquired new addresses.
The system panel popped up an update:
[Chimerism Progress: 36%]
[Total Global x-gene Signals: 52,117... still growing]
[Magneto's signal movement speed has increased. Unnatural displacement of railway tracks detected along the route, with deviation values of 3-7 cm. The signal source is using railway infrastructure to accelerate travel.]
[Estimated time of arrival in Westchester County: 31 hours.]
Thirty-one hours.
That was quite a bit shorter than Emma's estimate of two days. Old Magneto was moving more urgently than expected.
Arthur closed the panel.
"We leave tomorrow morning."
He took a final sip of coffee and walked toward the bedroom.
As he passed Wanda, her hand caught his sleeve. She didn't pull, just touched it.
"That Xavier." Wanda's voice was very soft. "He asked if Emma was safe."
Arthur stopped.
"Will he ask me the same question?"
"No." Arthur tilted his head slightly. "Because you don't need anyone to ask for you."
Her fingers released his sleeve.
Across the living room, Emma held her water glass, not looking their way.
The door closed.
Silence returned to the apartment. Outside the window, the sky was fully bright, New York's morning rush hour had begun, and the sound of traffic drifted up faintly from thirty floors below.
The city didn't yet know that in thirty-one hours, a man capable of lifting the entire city would be walking up to the gates of that estate that had appeared out of nowhere in the suburbs.
And before that, they had to get there first.