...
Caliban's mutant gift was the ability to track the signatures of other mutants within a specific radius. However, since no new mutants had been born in twenty-five years, he—like Logan—had long ago accepted that the world's mutant population had dwindled down to a lonely trio: himself, the Wolverine, and the Professor.
When he first saw the tail twitching behind Goku, he didn't immediately peg the boy as a mutant. In a world where the X-gene was functionally extinct, he assumed it was just some motorized toy or a piece of a costume a child might wear to feel special.
But after witnessing Goku's appetite, his skepticism began to crumble. No normal child—no normal *human*—could systematically demolish a week's worth of food storage meant for two grown men in a single sitting.
He focused his mind, casting out his sensory net.
"Wait... he isn't? But she is!"
Caliban's eyes widened in disbelief as his gaze flickered from Goku to the silent young girl, Laura. His tracking ability doubled as a biological scanner; he could "feel" the presence of the X-gene.
When he swept over Goku, he felt a strange, surging vitality—something dense and powerful—but it lacked the specific "flavor" of the X-gene. Yet, the girl sitting next to him practically hummed with the familiar, jagged energy of a mutant.
Gabriela was equally stunned, though for different reasons. She hadn't fully grasped the scale of Goku's hunger until she saw the empty pantry. She suddenly understood why the owner of the barbecue shop had looked like he was suffering a stroke when they left.
"You poor thing," Gabriela sighed, reaching out to stroke Goku's hair, her voice thick with pity. "Son, you must have been starving for a very long time to eat like that."
In her mind, his survival on the mountain was even grimmer than she had imagined. A boy with a metabolism like that, wandering the wilderness with no money? He must have spent every waking hour in a state of agonizing hunger.
"Starving? Not really," Goku replied casually, wiping a stray grain of rice from his cheek. "When I was training on the mountain, I'd just catch a wolf or a tiger. Sometimes, if I was lucky and looking for a big meal, I'd catch a dinosaur. The meat didn't taste as good as the food here, but it was plenty to fill me up. I always feel much stronger after a big feast!"
"Wolves... tigers... dinosaurs?"
Caliban and Gabriela exchanged a long, worried look. The boy's delusions seemed to be getting more elaborate. Dinosaurs? Perhaps he had found some large lizards in the mountains and his young mind had transformed them into monsters.
"I'm going out to train now!"
Having refueled his massive energy reserves, Goku hopped off his chair and dashed toward the factory's open courtyard. Between the alleyway fight and the border skirmish, he'd had a few scraps today, but they were too brief.
His muscles were itching for a real workout. He knew that if he wanted to be ready for the tournament in three years, he couldn't afford a single day of laziness.
Laura, clutching her toy ball, watched him go. A spark of curiosity lit up her dark eyes, and she hopped down to follow him.
"Stay inside the factory grounds!" Gabriela called out after them. "Don't go wandering off!"
As the children disappeared into the dusty yard, Logan emerged from the reinforced housing unit, pushing Professor X in his wheelchair. The Professor looked frail, his skin like parchment, but his eyes were momentarily clear and focused.
"Gabriela, tell us everything again," Logan growled, his voice low. "We need to map out a safe route to North Dakota."
He had consulted with the Professor, and Charles had been adamant. They could not turn their backs on these children. For the first time in years, the Professor's voice had carried the weight of the man who once led the X-Men. Logan couldn't say no to that.
"Route? What route? What's happening?" Caliban asked, looking back and forth between them.
Logan gave a clipped, grim summary of the situation. Within minutes, the four adults were huddled around a map. El Paso sat at the jagged southern tip of Texas; North Dakota was a straight shot north, across the entire belly of the United States.
To make it, they would have to cross thousands of miles of open road while being hunted by a private military corporation.
A precise, high-speed route was no longer a luxury—it was a necessity. They needed to move fast before the Institute's Reavers could lock down the highways. Logan's instincts, honed by decades of being a hunted man, told him their window of peace was closing.
"Pack the essentials," Logan ordered. "Medicine for the Professor is priority one. We can buy food and water at gas stations along the way."
He didn't mention that there wasn't much food left to pack anyway, thanks to their new young friend.
Ten minutes later, the group emerged into the courtyard, bags in hand, ready to load up the limo. They stopped dead in their tracks.
In the center of the dusty lot, Goku was performing lunging frog-jumps. Balanced across his shoulders was a massive, rusted industrial lathe—a piece of heavy machinery discarded from the factory's heyday. It was a hunk of solid steel that likely weighed between twenty and thirty tons.
Laura was perched on top of the machine, her legs dangling, watching Goku with an expression of pure wonder as he leaped and landed, the ground shuddering with every impact. He didn't even look like he was breaking a sweat.
"I think I believe you now," Logan muttered, his voice a low rasp of shock. "About him taking out twenty soldiers."
As a former teacher at the Xavier Institute, Logan knew mutants. He knew that power usually manifested in puberty and required years of physical maturation and discipline to master.
Even the strongest mutants often struggled with the "feedback" of their own power—using too much strength could shatter their own bones if their body wasn't ready.
Magneto hadn't reached his peak until his thirties. Even the strongest physical mutant Logan remembered, Fred Dukes—The Blob—could stop a tank shell with his fist and exert maybe twenty tons of force in a desperate burst.
But there was a massive difference between a "peak burst" of strength and using thirty tons as cardio equipment. Goku's base physical density and power were off the charts. And looking at the boy's relaxed posture, it was clear that the lathe wasn't even his limit—it was just the heaviest thing he could find in the yard.
"Caliban," Professor X whispered, his voice trembling with a mix of awe and confusion. "Are you absolutely certain he isn't a mutant?"
"I... I don't know anymore," Caliban stammered.
A boy with a tail who ate like week's worth of food and treated a factory machine like a backpack? If that wasn't a mutant, the only other explanation was that he wasn't from this planet.
Suddenly, Caliban's body went rigid. His eyes rolled back slightly as his tracking sense spiked. The color drained from his face.
"I sense them... Mutants are approaching. Fast. One of them... it's cold. It's like a void. It has to be that X-24! We have to go, now!"