"A god?" Apocalypse spat in disdain.
"Oh? You think yourself a god and think there aren't others? Wait, you even met others before. Not only those in Egypt," Eli shot back with a smirk.
"I mean, this Eli dude kinda looks like a young Thor, no?" Spider-Man asked from the ground. Several gathered heroes and mutants nodded in assent. Nobody except for Apocalypse's horsemen were in the mood for fighting anymore. Now, it was gossip time.
"You think he is Thor's secret son or something?" Jessica Jones asked her husband Luke Cage.
"Well, how many Odinsons have we met over the years? He might just as well be one of his many brothers," Luke casually countered.
"But they all look kinda different from another. This Eli really does look like Thor with green eyes," Black Widow added from the side, unaware still about the fatal wound Eli had stopped from being inflicted upon her by Mystique.
Up in the air, Apocalypse was slowly getting angrier and angrier at his adversary.
"How do you know all of this? My mind should be shielded!"
Eli decided not to answer the blue mutant's shout. He could barely read the mutants surface thoughts and only with high levels of concentration. He wouldn't give his opponent any extra information.
Eli reached out his hand to bring Shatterstar in its sword form floating next to him and retracted the black uru blade into his destroyer arm. Both the arm and Shatterstar began glowing in green energies.
As Eli's eyes began shining in emerald green, the two enemies shot toward each other for another high-speed melee exchange, Eli angling every blow to get his foe higher into the air. Eli was using magic to shield his surroundings from the shockwaves of their attacks, and that wasn't sustainable, no matter how vast his reserves were.
When Eli finally got Apocalypse a good distance above the nearest rooftops, he blocked another punch and unleashed the gathered energy in the destroyer arm into Apocalypse's chest from pointblank range. The beam pierced the mutant and left a long, green streak in the air.
However, Eli furrowed his brows. It pierced the mutant, yes. But his armor didn't have a scratch, and it looked like the damage was not even enough to debilitate his opponent. Instead, En Sabah Nur had gathered energies of his own and grasped toward Eli's head with blinding speed.
He managed to grab Eli's head and unleash his attack, but despite a veritable storm of energies erupting all around them, all Apocalypse saw was Eli's eyes changing shade toward a pale green.
"You seem to know nothing about gods then," Eli taunted with a smirk.
"Wha-" Apocalpyse's question was cut short by the energies he had unleashed multiplying rapidly and moving to engulf them both instead of just Eli.
At the same time, Eli grabbed Shatterstar with his left hand and once again plunged it into a weak spot of Apocalypse's armor. The light show didn't distract the mutant enough to miss his opportunity for a well-timed block, but before En Sabah Nur could concentrate on the next move of the sword, Eli once again unleashed the black, fragile looking, hollow wristblade and stabbed it toward his enemies' face.
Apocalypse tilted his head to the side, but the blade still left a deep, long cut from his nose to ear. Eli brought the blade back in a sweep, and despite Apocalypse disengaging, the sweep left another cut slightly below the first from below his ear toward his mouth.
"Your petty tricks tire me. I will show you the strength of a true god," Apocalypse angrily declared.
"Ha, you a true god? Of what?" Eli taunted. With eyes still shining pale green, he shattered his sword and began to rain the sharp shards on his foe instead of waiting for him to prepare some form of ultimate attack.
"Wow, did that guy get bitten by a radioactive blender?" Spider-Man once again spoke up to the amusement of several heroes. Even Anya had a small grin on her face. Eli had told her about that weird joke Stark and Clint made on the day of his first public fight. She would tell him later that it was a multiversal joke.
"Hey, lady! Did he really get bitten, or are his powers truly godly?" Kid Omega, the pink mohawk guy, shouted towards the floating form of Anya. He had seen her amused chuckle.
"Hmm... no, he was born a god. Same as Thor," she offered with a sincere smile. A few gasps rang through the ranks of the heroes. 'Same as Thor,' a lot of them thought in trepidation. Thor was among the strongest of them. So they needed to take this new god seriously.
"And you?" Black Widow asked. Getting information from seemingly light conversation was second nature to a spy like her. Anya being good friends with a different version of Natasha naturally knew what she was doing, but didn't really care.
"I am Anya, the Goddess of Fire. Eli's partner," Anya introduced herself.
"Damn, he's taken then? Is he looking for a mistress?" Mystique asked from among the ranks of the mutants.
Eli had released his grasp on the combatants just moments ago while unleashing the arm. Instead of using the distraction to once again hide among the Avengers, she decided to go back to 'her' faction. Since it appeared this god was on their side, no matter who won between the two, this fight with the Avengers was over.
But before Anya could answer the irksome question, an explosion was heard up above. The fight already looked explosive, but this was the first time the sound was actually heard. Everybody's eyes shot up again.
Up in the air, Eli's left arm had shallow cuts all over and was littered in blisters. A green film of energy enveloped the arm and began visibly healing it while the rest of him looked fine.
"You'll shoot missiles like that into your own people?" Eli asked with a frown.
"Pah, the strong will survive. And I counted on your hero complex," Apocalypse spat in disdain as his Celestial ship floated behind him. The mutant, too, was covered in thousands of little cuts. His armor was knicked in many places. His eyes were glowing a little. Clearly, he was using some kind of power to connect to the ship to shoot missiles and fixing the wounds Eli had inflicted.
"Hero complex? I just offered the mutants killing thousands of people," Eli mused in wonder.
"All for a 'good cause'. I know people like you. You enjoy killing, but hide it behind some noble lie of doing it to help. I bet you have bathed in the blood of countless people with a smile on your face," Apocalypse narrated, either to stall for something or to discredit him in the eyes of the people present.
"I can even read your filthy mind. Every person I ever killed had taken the life of another with their own hands or through orders. If they can take the lives of others, they should all be prepared to suffer the same fate," Eli explained, stalling too. He was charging up a massive spell to transport this Celestial crafted ship somewhere else. He didn't know how long it would take the ship to come back, but it would stop it from unleashing whatever Apocalypse was preparing, hopefully long enough to finish off this cockroach.
"You have chosen poorly if you thought me a stepping stone to announce your existence to the world," Apocalypse declared from inside a protective beam from his ship, which he thought was the reason Eli stopped attacking.
Apocalypse showed a defiant, arrogant smirk until he noticed that the beam from his ship was missing. He turned back, and instead of charging energy cannons and the comfort of the sentient ship connected to him with technopathy radiated, Apocalypse only saw clear skies and scattered clouds with deep gulfs in them created by their battle.
"What.. where is-" Apocalypse's mutter was stopped by a sword piercing his back.
The mutant turned to face his cowardly attacker with a backhand swing, but Eli came from below with a heavy punch to his adverseries chin. The sword was thrown and controlled with telekinesis to give him the proper time for a wind up from another direction.
As En Sabah Nur's head was cocked back from the punch, Eli pierced his exposed neck with his destroyer arm's wrist blade with the blade turned downward to reach the heart.
"He... actually won?" Moira muttered from below. She was devastated, Apocalypse was her one big play for this life. Without him, the reincarnator would have to live through all the pain and misery of the mutant race yet again.
When Eli floated down holding Apocalypse with one hand, the mutant's ship came back as if teleporting and whisked Apocalypse away before disappearing again. Eli didn't chase, though, because he had read enough surface thoughts to know that killing the blue self-proclaimed god was much more troublesome than necessary. The mutant had so many contingencies in place for his bodies demise that he could be described as the god of cockroaches.
Yes, Eli did enormous amounts of damage to his enemies' body, but from the thoughts he read, Eli knew that Apocalypse was able to easily patch himself up. Admittedly, it all came at a cost; his host body falling apart. Meaning what Eli fought might not have even been the actual body of Apocalypse. Ending Apocalypse wasn't his main concern in this world, though. It might even put him in the bad graces of this realities' Celestials, something he would try to avoid.
"With that out of the way, how about we clean up some filth?" Eli asked the mutants below after looking at the place the Celestial ship had arrived and disappeared from in the blink of an eye.
"Wait! There has to be another way!" Steve Rogers shouted as the mutants disengaged from their foes on the battlefield completely and gathered around Lorna, Wolverine, Kid Omega, and Moira. Three horsemen and Apocalypse's speaker. Though Famine, or Autumn Rolfson, was a horseman of Apocalypse, too, they all avoided her just as much as she avoided them.
"Oh yeah? You mean break out all wrongfully captured and tortured mutants and 'arrest' all those present? And then we bring those who planned and financed it all to trial, and they weasel their way out anyway and continue to bring misery to their fellow humans? Despite living in a world where you have access to powered people who can read minds, judge lies from truth, or divine the souls of the dead for accurate accounts of what they truly are?"
Captain America had a conflicted expression on his face. Naturally, he knew that Eli's little speech hit too close to home.
"How about this? Every facility that you Avengers manage to bring to justice, we will leave alone if you manage to put the actual mastermind behind bars. That way, you can save those that abduct and torture children from certain death, Captain America. That's what you want, right?" Eli scoffed.
"Hey, cut him some slack! We're not the bad guys here!" Tony Stark shouted from next to Steve Rogers.
"Stark... I only met two of you. Yet despite all your heroics, both of you still fall short of your own goal," Eli muttered with disappointment.
"And you think killing is everyone is not falling short of anything?" Tony argued back.
"Tell me then. You all live in the same city as Wilson Fisk, the kingpin of crime. Spider-Man over there has publicly outed his real personality as the kingpin twice in the last six years. Yet Fisk is a free man. Once released because of a deal with the FBI, the second time he somehow managed to be freed because of a 'technicality in court' and managed to hide his release from the public," Eli began his story as he looked toward Spider-Man.
"Wait, Fisk is free?" Spider-Man shouted with terror in his voice.
"He lives right here in Hell's kitchen, running his criminal empire from the shadows. He runs a kill squad to kill his enemies and loans them out as weapons for hire. He runs a human trafficking ring that exports children and women to his wealthy clients, and he uses that money to expand his empire, flooding the streets with drugs and violence. Why do you allow this?" Eli narrated with a frown as he noticed Tony Stark's expression of discomfort.
"How do you know all of this?" Stark asked with a worried frown of his own.
"I read his mind before I broke it," Eli spat as Stark's eyes widened.
"Oh. What a great hero you are, Tony Stark," Eli sighed with a tired sigh after reading Tony's thoughts for a short moment, looking for confirmation.
"What does that mean, Tony?" Steve Rogers asked.
"I... I was involved in freeing Fisk. But he should have been under house arrest with no way to fully run whatever this 'god' described. We struck a deal for information on terrorist cells from Hydra and the Hand among others," Tony admitted with a complicated expression.
"He revealed only his enemies to you, so you can clean them up for him. Just like with his deal with the FBI before. This time around, though, you forced him to enslave a mutant technopath so he could disable all your bugs. If that makes you feel any better," Eli spoke to Stark with a smirk.
"Tony...," Steve said with a disappointed tone.
"Okay, that's about it from me. I was told I talk too much. Before you run interference in our mission, dear Avengers, let me offer you a sort of compromise. Among the people present, we have about nine people who can read minds to some degree. How about we only kill those who have actually actively helped with all the killing and torture. If we can't help it, no killing guards that are just there for pay and have no idea what is happening to the hundreds of kids they abduct and cage like animals," Eli spat in derision.
"Why does it all have to end in killing?" Spider-Man asked in a defeated tone.
"Because if you don't value the lives of others, it's only fair that your life holds little value on its own. These people are a cancer," Eli argued back.
"But... if you kill a murderer, the number of murderers stays the same... and the circle of hurt never stops. You kill fathers and mothers, making children grow up without parents. You kill lovers, spreading pain toward their loved ones. They will inflict their pain onto others, and that's your fault," Spider-Man countered with conviction.
"I'll just kill two murderers and just like that, the number of murderers decreases by one. And if children are raised without parents after I kill a mass murderer like Fisk, that's society's fault and hardly mine. This country spends so much on weapon programs and their military, yet they can't run a well-founded orphan program? And that's why you want me to let a madman that smiles at the screams of babies live, Pete?"
"Hurting others because of the pain you experienced is an excuse of the weak-willed," Anya added, speaking up for the first time in a long time.
Eli floated over to Anya and gently caressed her cheek. She knew an argument was personal for her. Her past, being imprisoned in her own mind by her father and made to do horrible things... it had taken her a long time to let go of her inner demons. It was part of the reason she wanted to be so close to Eli, the man who freed her. Gave her closure.
"Alright. I think that's enough with the chitchat," Eli said as he clapped his hand and turned toward the mutants to gain their attention.
"If that's alright with you, I'll take you to a facility run by some military ghost only known as 'the director'. Well, that's all Fisk knew anyway. Though, he had his suspicions about him being a man called Malcolm Colcord. A man that survived the original Weapon X program massacre," Eli offered as he looked toward Wolverine, the one responsible for that particular massacre.
"Someone from that hellhole lived? That's too bad," Logan gruffly spat.
"Time to fix your mistake, Logan. The man probably hates mutants, and that's why he's so adamant about rounding them up like cattle for his experiments."
"So how we getting there? You chased away our ride, darling." Mystique in all her blue glory sauntered over with a seductive hip swing.
Eli looked at her head to toe and shrugged. He floated up in the air and released a small Asgardian ship that can hold roughly twenty people. Though, he hid it with magic at first before slowly making it appear. That way the people present would think of it as either cloaking technology or an invisibility spell.
Before he could address the mutants to board his ship, Tuuli came swooping down from the clouds and landed on his shoulder. The thunderbird began to caw and make gull-like noises as Eli listened with his full attention.
"Some red clothed dude named Deadpool was fighting someone with Anya's old alias 'Taskmaster' and you tore off his... worm for being an impostor? That's a bit cruel... why did you even listen in on them?" Eli asked with furrowed brows. His bird continued to sing her story.
"Deadpool was fighting him over who gets to kill another dude named Black Swan?" Eli inquired as he began to gently rub the thunderbird's chest feathers.
"You thought they wanted to kill a bird at first and that's why you stepped in, huh?" Tuuli reluctantly admitted to Eli's speculation with a nod, then continued her story.
"Okay, I get it. But I still don't understand why you would go for his 'worm'. Surely, he wasn't naked and flapping it around for you, so where did that idea even come from?" Eli asked with an incredulous expression. The bird took a few moments before it offered a soft caw.
"Ugh, Val is incorrigible," Eli said as he rubbed his temples.
"Does he speak bird?" Kid Omega asked from the ground with a raised brow while Eli and his bird were talking.
"Look at his concentrated face as he listens. He must share some kind of connection to the bird to understand it," Lorna spoke her guess.
"What a weird kid," Wolverine muttered.
"This ship... it looks like a viking ship. Are you Asgardian?" Moira asked as she turned to Anya.
"Hmm, we are. But it's a little more complicated than that," Anya offered in response. Everyone had paid close attention to Anya's reply and everyone came to different conclusions.
Were the two 'gods' truly from Asgard? Were they exiled? Just strolling around, trying to be 'heroes' by fixing this 'injustice'? Tony himself was more thinking about the words of having met 'two of him', while Steve was thinking about all the implications of letting the mutants and x-men go on their mission. It was too bad Thor wasn't here, he could talk to these two and possibly change their mission to something less deadly.
Though, Steve was also thinking about the truth behind Eli's words. Were they the ones in the wrong? Tony certainly was and that was another can of worms Steve didn't want to get into. How much more did he hide from the Avengers? How many more criminals like Fisk were set free for their justice? And were the mutants right about the US government and US politicians running all these illegal labs? All these thoughts were running through Captain America's mind and stopped him from even stopping the mutants from leaving.
All Avengers looked toward him for what to do next but since he stayed silent, they all just watched as Eli floated up some of the mutants to his boat with his powers, while others joined on their own.
However one Avenger was inwardly freaking out after thinking about everything Eli had just said. All the things with Fisk and the injustice mutants suffered at the hands of everyone stopped him from thinking about something that would usually send Spider-Man in a spiraling panic immediately. But then, it him like a truck. At one point, Eli had casually called him Pete.