Daisy wanted to contact Professor X outside, but the base was underground and its thick walls blocked both her psychic power and her phone signal. She would have to find a solution herself.
She called over two Strike Team agents and handed them her phone. "Find these girls in my phone. There should be five of them—quintuplets. They've been scattered around the base. Go find them!"
Using the faint psychic signals she could sense, Daisy roughly pointed out several directions, then sent her people off to search.
She could not control Magneto by herself. Add the White Queen's five daughters, though, and that should be enough, right?
The base was in chaos, but the agents had targets and photographs. For elite HYDRA operatives, finding a few girls was not particularly difficult.
Before long, the White Queen's five "daughters" were rescued by the Strike Team from five cages located far apart from one another. Three short, chubby men came with them.
The five girls looked as though they had been carved from the same mold. Their gazes were sharp, and they vaguely resembled the White Queen.
Stryker knew they were telepaths, so he had imprisoned them separately.
The same treatment had been used on the short, chubby quadruplets, three of whom had been captured. Stryker could not see any obvious abilities in them, but he was deeply suspicious and believed they were hiding their powers.
Each Strike Team rescue had therefore found one girl together with one short, chubby man.
As secret agents working for Nick Fury, the three men reacted to the S.H.I.E.L.D. uniforms like they had found family, practically bursting into tears. The Strike Team elites did not know whether to laugh or cry. They could hardly admit they were HYDRA and only pretending to be S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, so they simply rescued the three men who were not listed on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s official roster.
Daisy did not care. They were Fury's people. Saving them along the way was hardly a bad thing.
For a moment, Daisy found herself surrounded by five cool-faced girls and three squat, comical-looking men.
Their clothes were torn, but the five girls had not been tortured much. Stryker already had the illusionist working for him, and he had captured so many mutants lately with such a wide range of abilities that a few telepaths did not rank especially high on his list of priorities.
"Celeste, Esme, Sophie, Phoebe, Mindee." The five girls introduced themselves one by one. Daisy was still completely lost. They looked identical: same height, same build, even the same bust size. She could not tell one from another at all.
The three short men tried to introduce themselves as well, but Daisy cut them off. "Rule number one for agents: don't casually give out your names."
She had no interest in learning the names of three little shorties.
She had just finished calming them down when she turned and saw the five girls studying the base guards in white uniforms who had been forced to kneel in a row. One girl's eyes began to glow. The other four seemed to receive a signal, and their psychic power started converging.
The base soldiers standing nearby on guard duty and watching the prisoners slowly developed glazed expressions. Their gun barrels began moving toward the kneeling guards' heads.
"Fire."
"Fire."
"Fi..."
Daisy coughed hard. A cone-shaped psychic spike severed their mental connection. "Esme or Sophie—whichever one you are—I came to save you for Emma's sake. I don't care which of you is which. Don't make trouble for me."
Individually, none of the five girls could match her. All five together were another story. Daisy could handle three by herself, but four linked together were already too much. If all five connected, she would definitely lose. Fortunately, establishing their psychic link took time.
All five turned to look at her at once. Daisy thought for a moment that the five little troublemakers were about to challenge her, but instead they backed down.
She pointed toward Magneto in the distance, who was making Crossbones and Spider-Woman miserable. "See that old man? Use your psychic power to suppress him. Can you do it?"
The five stared at her in perfect unison until Daisy almost felt creeped out. She stared right back without giving an inch.
Esme, at the front, turned away with an extremely haughty expression. The other four turned at exactly the same angle and took the same steps. Their movements were so uniform that they looked like one person.
The five rapidly linked their minds, then hurled a combined psychic attack at Magneto.
Caught off guard, the old man's magnetic field faltered. Crossbones did not hesitate for even a second before punching him.
Magneto spat out a mouthful of blood mixed with a large amount of pale-blue translucent fluid. When he raised his head again, clarity had returned to his eyes. Within two seconds he had assessed the situation. Without hesitation, he pushed his magnetic control to the maximum. The storm of metal became a massive wall, forcing Crossbones and Spider-Woman back, and then he turned and ran.
Once Magneto fled, the fighting ended quickly. More than sixty base guards had been killed, over fifty wounded, and a small number escaped. The remaining two hundred-plus all surrendered.
Whether those escapees had connections with the base garrison, or whether anyone had deliberately let them go, Daisy did not care. As long as they had caught the crimes red-handed here, her operation was a success. There were too many bad people in the world for her to deal with every one of them.
Horrific. Miserable. Daisy was not thinking about the wounded and dead from the battle, but the mutants Stryker had experimented on.
Some had their internal organs removed and replaced with mechanical ones, kept alive only by respirators.
Others had their limbs amputated, with feet sewn where hands should be and hands attached where feet belonged.
Still others had plant-like vines growing from the sides of their heads. Their blood vessels had been completely replaced by plant tissue, and pitch-black blood crawled slowly through their bodies. Each time the blood passed through the heart, the plant-affinity mutant trembled violently for several seconds.
"How could they dare do something like this?!" Dinah Madani, a senior Homeland Security agent of Iranian descent, stared in disbelief. She could hardly believe she was seeing something so inhuman.
These mutants had been treated worse than animals in Stryker's laboratory. Most had been tortured until their will to live was gone. They looked at the agents with nothing but numbness in their eyes.
The senior agents from the other departments were not exactly burning with righteous fury, but they still felt the horror personally. These were intelligent beings who spoke the same language and lived on the same planet. It was difficult to imagine such atrocities happening right in front of them.
Daisy quietly observed everyone's reactions. The people she had selected from each department were basically those with a sense of justice—and enough backing that they could afford to act on it.
The two U.S. military officers pretended they had known nothing, but some of their subordinates truly had not. At least most of the rank and file had been unaware.
One young man who had only recently enlisted saw the horrors inside the base and vomited uncontrollably. He could not believe the base where he had been stationed for three months was conducting experiments like these.
Some of the remaining soldiers looked sympathetic, some looked tormented, and some looked as though they had finally been freed from a burden. Every face told a different story.