Chapter 148: Phoenix on the Edge — and Magneto's Private Calculations
The shift in Jean's aura hit the neighborhood like a pressure change before a storm — something in the air that everyone felt before they understood what they were feeling.
Logan felt it first.
He set down his glass.
Wade noticed immediately. "We're going, aren't we."
"We're going."
Wade grabbed the bottle and both glasses. He seemed to feel this was reasonable.
Across the neighborhood, Beast was finishing emergency field dressing on Cyclops, Havok, Iceman, and Colossus — quick and practiced, the minimum necessary to stabilize them. He looked up at the shift in the air, made a decision, and moved.
In a quieter corner of Hell's Kitchen, Professor Xavier and Magneto had been talking.
Magneto's assignment — the one Ethan had given him, though neither of them had framed it that way — was simply to keep Xavier occupied and out of the fight for as long as possible. It was working. Xavier had no particular desire to be in the middle of a battle, and Magneto was, whatever else he was, an interesting person to talk to.
Then Xavier felt it.
His face didn't change much. But something in him went still in the way that happened when a very specific kind of fear arrived.
"I was afraid of this," he said quietly.
Magneto looked at him.
"Jean insisted on coming," Xavier said. "The others promised they'd manage it. I should have—" He stopped. "I knew the risk. I agreed anyway."
He didn't say the rest of it. He didn't need to. Magneto understood the mathematics: Jean Grey's other self, uncontrolled, in the middle of a neighborhood already on fire, with this many people in it. Federal soldiers, Hell's Kitchen residents, X-Men, Avengers — none of them had the capacity to survive what the Phoenix Force looked like when it stopped holding back.
Xavier had been sitting with the weight of that possibility since they'd arrived. He'd told himself the others would prevent it.
The others had not prevented it.
"I need your help, Erik."
Magneto looked at him for a long moment.
Then he smiled — not warmly.
"I told you not to involve yourself in this. I told you specifically." He let that sit. "If that uncontrolled girl destroys Hell's Kitchen, you get to explain it to Ethan. I have no interest in being in that conversation."
The words were cold. The calculation behind them was not.
Magneto had been watching this operation with the careful attention of a man revising his assessments in real time. He had expected Hell's Kitchen's defense to be competent. He had not expected it to be this. Ethan's roster — its depth, its cohesion, the evident loyalty — was something Magneto had spent years trying to build for the Brotherhood and had never quite achieved.
And Wanda and Pietro were here. Safe. Fully in it, fighting for something that mattered to them.
That was not a small thing.
He had also been doing math of a different kind. The Brotherhood had numbers and conviction, but if he was being honest — the kind of honest that he reserved for private thought — the quality wasn't there. Mystique and Sabretooth were useful. The rest were not in the same category as the people he'd watched operate tonight.
He had been thinking, off and on for the last hour, about what it would look like to bring the Brotherhood under Ethan's roof. Not as subordinates. As allies with a shared address.
The problem was the framing. Magneto didn't present himself as joining things. He needed a reason that preserved the shape of the decision.
He was working on that when the answer presented itself.
Xavier. If he could bring Xavier — if the X-Men came to Hell's Kitchen, if Charles could be persuaded to relocate his entire operation — then Magneto arriving would look like the natural consequence of that, not like capitulation. And Ethan would have every reason to accept, because Xavier's academy was objectively the best-organized collection of powered individuals on the planet.
He didn't particularly like Charles. He wasn't sure he ever had, exactly. But he could work with him, and he could use him, and right now those two things were enough.
"I'll help you," Magneto said. "But you'll owe me something in return."
Xavier opened his mouth—
The aura hit them both.
Magneto recognized it immediately. Not Jean's signature. Wanda's.
Wanda, at full output, moving toward the Phoenix Force surge. Putting herself between it and whatever it was about to consume.
His expression changed.
"That's Wanda," he said. It came out flat, which was not how he felt.
He'd only just found her. She'd only just — they were not reconciled, exactly, but they were something. She was alive and she knew his name and she hadn't rejected him entirely, which was more than he'd had any right to expect.
He didn't think about what happened to people who stood in front of an uncontrolled Phoenix Force.
He lifted Xavier with his magnetic field — not gently — and moved.
Fast.
"If anything happens to my daughter," he said, and his voice had gone to a frequency that Xavier had heard before and never wanted to hear again, "I will level what's left of this school."
He meant the Xavier Institute. He meant it completely.
Xavier was already closing his eyes, reaching outward, finding Jean's mind in the noise of the battle, beginning the process of trying to call her back from wherever the Phoenix had taken her.
It was all he could do. He did it.
The rest of Hell's Kitchen felt the shift in Wanda's output and responded.
The restraint that had been governing the fight — measured force, contain rather than destroy — went away on Ethan's side. Everyone accelerated. Everyone was trying to clear their current engagement and get to Wanda.
The fastest route was straight through.
Ethan was already moving when Carol reappeared.
She'd taken a hard landing. She'd gotten back up. That was worth noting.
"You're persistent," he said.
She hit him from the side and drove him off his trajectory.
He caught himself, reoriented, and looked at her with something that was not quite irritation.
The Phoenix situation was sixty seconds from becoming irreversible. He knew that. Carol did not know that, or didn't care, or had decided that stopping him was the mission regardless of anything else happening.
He was going to have to end this in the next few seconds.
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