The eerie illusions surrounding them vanished as the illusionist slumped in his wheelchair.
The man seemed to lose every bone in his body at once. His pale eyes stared fixedly at the crowd, but he made no sound.
"Dead?" Several agents kept their pistols raised as they studied the strange man.
Crossbones strode over and checked beneath his nose. "Dead."
Bang! Bang! With the illusion gone and no room left to maneuver, the guards Stryker had hired opened fire on them from inside the laboratory.
Gunfire erupted without pause. The agents hurried for cover while several HYDRA operatives, wearing expressions of perfect loyalty, shielded Daisy in her short skirt and heels behind them.
There were only a little over seventy of them, armed mostly with handguns. The guards, meanwhile, kept pouring in. At a glance there were at least several hundred, all with vicious expressions and carrying not only clubs and machetes but pistols and submachine guns as well.
The Joint Anti-Abduction Task Force was at a disadvantage in both numbers and equipment, but none of them were afraid.
They represented the White House and the Pentagon. The base's own garrison was supposed to be on their side.
Seeing the agents in danger, the soldiers stationed at the base panicked. They could neither advance nor retreat. A crowd of servicemen had no idea whether they were supposed to help the base guards shoot the agents to silence them or join the agents in suppressing the resistance inside the base.
"Colonel Ian, Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey, remember the oath you swore to your country." Daisy offered them a way out at exactly the right moment. The patriotic oath was just rhetoric. These men watched Stryker conduct experiments every day, so they were hardly good people, but that did not mean she should refuse to recruit them.
It was an excellent off-ramp. The two officers immediately took the lead and opened fire on the base guards, making their position clear.
Their subordinates followed suit, while officers at every level began issuing orders down the chain of command to clear out the base guards.
The garrison had three thousand troops. They obviously could not all abandon their posts and wander around with Daisy. Fewer than a hundred were in the immediate combat zone, but these were officers, people who could give orders to those under them.
Military orders carried weight. As long as an order was not completely absurd, even the dumbest American soldier would obey it.
Large numbers of U.S. troops rushed out of their quarters, grabbed their weapons, and joined the suppression.
A regular army had little trouble dealing with guards who only knew how to brutalize the old, weak, sick, and disabled. How could rifles lose to iron clubs and knives? The agents had only pistols, but every one of them was an exceptional shot. With Crossbones—now not much weaker than Captain America—leading the charge, the Strike Team drove through the guards' formation like a spearhead.
Seven or eight mutants under Stryker's control also appeared to block them. Crossbones killed two in quick succession, while the rest were shot down under concentrated fire. Their powers did not matter when their bodies were in such terrible condition. They simply could not stop bullets.
With help from the base garrison, the agents began freeing prisoners.
The soldiers knew the terrain and were eager to earn some credit. They led the agents from room to room, clearing resistance and conducting rescues. Everyone rushed to distinguish themselves and prove they were not on Stryker's side.
Someone brought Daisy a chair. She sat there like a boss, listening to one piece of good news after another and occasionally nodding in approval. Just when she thought victory was a foregone conclusion, something unexpected happened.
Boom! More than a dozen base soldiers acting as guides and three agents had just entered a room when they were violently blasted back out. They slammed into the wall, and then countless metal fragments pinned them there like broken dolls.
They died on the spot.
Daisy's eyes narrowed. As the dust cleared, a gaunt old man in a white prison uniform slowly walked out of the room.
Magneto?! How was this old man here? When had Stryker captured him?
Daisy had no time to think. Magneto raised his right hand, and countless metal fragments danced through the air as if alive. A torrent of metal gathered above him. The old man looked toward Daisy from a distance—perhaps her outfit stood out too much, perhaps for some other reason—then turned his palm downward. The silver stream shot toward her.
Naturally, such a flashy but impractical attack could not hurt Director Daisy. A few scraps of metal would not even break her defense, but her clothes would be another matter.
She leaped aside, and the chair she had been sitting on was shredded into splinters.
Seeing that Magneto was not wearing his helmet, she immediately used her psychic power and tried to control him.
A cone-shaped psychic blast slammed toward Magneto. The completely invisible energy attacked his brain directly, sweeping through his mind like a storm. One hit—nothing. Another—still nothing!
Daisy cursed inwardly and attacked twice more before finally admitting an uncomfortable fact: after being subjected to the same thing often enough, people really did build resistance. Magneto and old Charles had been friends for decades, and Magneto had been mind-controlled more times than he could count. Apparently he had trained up some resistance!
Against telepaths on Professor X or the White Queen's level, he still needed the helmet because their psychic power was simply too strong. Against Director Daisy, however, he could manage without it. His own resistance, combined with the layers of illusion the illusionist had left inside his mind, gave him a respectable defense.
Magneto blocked several psychic strikes in succession.
Through their brief mental contact, Daisy confirmed that Stryker really had controlled Magneto. The old man's mind was full of memories: being tortured by the Nazis as a child, the tragedy of his wife and daughter being killed when he tried to retire in middle age, and, in his later years, the heroic humiliation of being cornered in a bathroom and beaten unconscious by a squad of anti-Magneto mechanical soldiers.
The Hammer Industries logos gleaming on the mechanical soldiers made Daisy cover her face. She had been wondering who in the world had the ability to capture Magneto. So this was where it had come from...
She had to admit Mr. Reed's anti-Magneto mechanical soldiers were impressive, and Stryker had certainly been willing to spend money. Five of the machines attacked together and beat the old man unconscious.
Was this what people called lifting a rock only to drop it on your own foot? Daisy was not sure. Either way, she had to fight now.
At her signal, Spider-Woman, Ms. Drew, and Crossbones attacked Magneto together.
Ms. Drew's physical stats were more than strong enough. In the Marvel world, any hero associated with spiders seemed built to take punishment. Spider-Man was constantly getting battered all over the place by villains, yet he was rarely seriously injured. His recovery was incredible; strip off the costume and he could go right back to school.
The Mind Scepter had unlocked Crossbones' physical potential. Aside from lacking a shield, he was now basically comparable to the earlier Captain America.
With the two of them working together and Daisy occasionally applying psychic pressure, they could just barely hold Magneto in place.
The other agents saw Daisy rubbing her forehead and assumed she was thinking of a solution. They had no idea her psychic power was furiously attacking the illusion the illusionist had left inside Magneto's mind.
After several attempts, Daisy decided it was no good. This simply was not the kind of battle she excelled at.