"Here, have some fun with him while we're loading up everyone," Eli said as he threw the bloodied body of Malcolm Colcord over to Wolverine.
Eli and the two women were done with everything on the lower levels of this base, had rescued Marius and five other broken mutants on the lowest floor and brought back all the evidence they needed to expose S.H.I.E.L.D.'s dirty secrets in this base.
"Why wait until we're done?" Wolverine asked, his arms and face covered in blood. Barely any of it was his own.
"His heart, is has to keep beating. The sicko linked it to a failsafe. Once it stops beating all the collars they put on the prisoners will go boom," Eli calmly replied. Everyone stopped in their tracks to look at him. Even Moira and Mystique didn't know, but they were glad they didn't go too far with him downstairs while Eli was busy for three hours. Though they inwardly cursed him for not mentioning it sooner.
"Man, so much hatred. Most of them don't even remember why they hate mutants so much," the pink mohawk wearing teenager muttered.
"Yeah, about that. Turns out a billion-year-old sentient bacteria worked quite hard on that through fear-mongering and subconscious bias created through subtle propaganda. Not joking," Eli explained with a strained but content smile.
"Your smile, you already dealt with it?" Anya asked with a smile of her own. Such a revelation should have elicited a tight frown from her love if it was still a problem.
"We had good luck. It was here, and I was able to wipe it out," Eli admitted with a nod.
"Did you get any evidence downstairs? This floor is gigantic, but except for labs with computers we couldn't get anything out of, there is nothing that would prove who financed all of this," Lorna, the green haired master of metal inquired with a deep frown. She was glad they got to rescue so many mutants, but Lorna will never get over the atrocities she has to witness while doing so.
"We did. And much more, we should find Charles or someone with vast mental powers to decipher a gift from our god of storms," Moira said while typing on a console at the side. The screen said something about it being locked because of the alarm, but it appeared her hacking skills would be enough to get around that.
"Anything peculiar on this floor, love?" Eli asked as he stepped toward Anya.
The goddess of fire showed a smile, but it was clear from her body language that this place made her uncomfortable. Her fist that tightly clenched the grip of her vibranium-uru sword Eldros gave away some unease as well.
"I... I don't think extremis will be enough to heal them. Most of these people here are broken in more than just their body. Can your mind magics heal those wounds?"
"I could make them forget, I can offer them vengeance, but no, I can't just snap my finger to heal them. Only time and a nurturing environment will do that," Eli softly replied as he hugged Anya.
"So... all we did was save empty, broken vessels?"
"Afraid so. Though by taking out the players, we reduce the number of kids it will happen to in the future. War never has winners, only those that lose less," Eli softly spoke as he patted her long hair through the illusion of her head armor. The real armor was just a uru headband, same as Eli, but she could make it look like a magnificent, imposing crown of metal and fire. Out of battle, this would be too gaudy for the fire goddess. However while fighting, this crown together with her spiky pauldrons looked quite intimidating.
"Got any plans for the rescued mutants?" Wolverine asked to break the silence a few moments later. Eli stopped the hug and softly laid his hand on Anya's cheek reassuringly for a short moment before turning to the clawed mountain of muscle and hair.
"Nope, I'm not in the habit of recruiting child armies, so all I want to do is get them out," Eli answered with a cheeky smile. Clearly, this was some kind of dig at the X-Men that Wolverine was a part of not too long ago.
"We should get them to Charles anyway. Him and Hank have the lab I will need to check the compatibility of your extremis and create it in big enough quantities for all of these people," Moira argued from the side.
"Fine by me. We could clear out some other bases while you work on that," Eli agreed with a carefree smile, though Anya noticed it looked a little forced.
After loading up all the mutants on a second space ship Eli made appear out of nowhere, he closed up the entrance to this base and hid any proof of there ever being anything other than some natural stone wall next to a dam with a spell. If anyone ever wanted to find this base again, they would have to go through a few meters of stone harder than most bedrock.
A short flight later, the two ships made their way to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters in Salem, New York. An old, bald man in a futuristic wheel chair surrounded by people in some sort of uniform was waiting for them on the great lawn outside the gigantic victorian mansion.
"Mister Eli, welcome to our humble school," Charles Xavier welcomed as the two ships landed and those that used to be X-Men like Logan, Kid Omega and Dani started helping the rescued 'lab rats' to disembark the roomier of the two space ships.
All present current-time X-Men like Storm, Jean Grey and Beast looked appaled at the sorry state of the rescued mutants and immediately started organizing students of the school to help bring the wounded to the infirmary and the others to the dorms. Moira left together with Hank toward his lab with a case of three large doses of extremis and a datapad with some of its research on it. Hank was only shown the premise of the research paper and immediately followed Moira, no questions asked.
"Such a grand welcome. Does your team of X-Men want to join us in rescuing some mutants?" Eli asked with a calm smile.
"I heard of your encounter and your plans from Captain Rogers. If possible, I would like to dissuade you from any more unnecessary bloodshed. Clearly, you are strong enough to free these unfortunate souls with no need to take lives," Charles spoke with a disarming smile.
"And leave them be to abduct more kids when we leave? From what I've been told by Raven over there, you have read minds since you were an adolescent. Do you truly believe they would ever stop? That their backers would ever stop?" Eli's brows were furrowed. Children were stolen right of the streets in this reality, yet every faction except for the Brotherhood of Mutants led by Magneto barely cared to bring those that did all this to justice. And the Brotherhood went at it all wrong, only breeding more violence with their 'terrorist' attacks.
"Violence cannot be the answ-"
"Let me stop you right there before you bring up the same arguments as the Avengers. You have a noble goal, but clearly, it's only been getting worse and worse over the years for mutants. Your way isn't working," Eli tiredly interrupted.
"Don't belittle the professor, you have no idea what h-" Scott 'Cyclops' Summers shouted, but he was interrupted by a clap from Eli that was immediately followed by a green energy lighting up the head of Cyclops for a barely perceptible moment. The mutant with the red glasses was still talking, but no sound made by him reached anyone.
"Ugh, I've talked to like four of you idealists in the last day, yet you all have the same inane arguments. And don't belittle me, Summers. You don't even know who or what I am," Eli countered coldly.
Just as the argument could devolve more, Eli felt something stirring his mind. He looked back to Charles as his surroundings changed to one of his mindscapes. The professor was visibly shocked to see it happen like this. Eli was clearly fully in control. Charles wasn't in the driver's seat, so to speak, like he usually was.
"Strongest telepath among the mutants, eh? From the strength of this probe, you were either trying to forcefully read old memories or change recent ones... that's not very nice. Show a little restraint, Charles," Eli coldly spat. He was being a little hypocritical because he, too, read minds a lot. But he excused his actions by mostly only checking surface thoughts and breaking into minds only when it came to enemies who forfeited their lives by being terrible human and non-human beings.
"How... what are you?" Charles asked in discomfort.
"Someone who's mind you shouldn't have entered carelessly with bad intentions," Eli answered with a vengeful smirk.
Out in the 'real' world, Charles suddenly started sweating and shaking in his chair. The first to notice was Jean Grey, who had a hand on the professor's shoulder. With a determined frown, she entered the battle of minds that she suspected Charles was losing. When she arrived, she was next to a young Charles.
He still had hair and working legs. However, before she registered anything else in the surroundings, Charles was hit by a car and was paralyzed from the waist down.
The surroundings changed. Charles was older. He had less hair, but he was walking again. However, this time around, a man Jean recognized as Amahl Farouk, or Shadow King, was fighting Charles with a young Ororo aiding the villain in the streets of Egypt. During the ensuing fight, a stray energy bolt hit the professor at his lower back, and once again, everything fast forwarded to the point where the professor learned that he was paralyzed once more.
Yet again, the surroundings changed into another memory of the professor. This time, Jean was a part of it. Yet again, the professor lost the use of his legs during an alien invasion at the hands of an alien calling himself Lucifer. This was the point where Jean had seen enough. With a powerful blast of her own psionic abilities, she tried to shatter whatever power was keeping Charles' mind in this place.
However, all that happened was that the illusion of the memory shattered for her and only her. She was still in the mind of this Eli as she quickly realized. A few meters away from her, the young Allfather floated silently in a colorful night sky with stars and lights Jean Grey had never seen before. Had she asked, Eli might have told her it was the same beautiful night sky he had seen all those years ago during his first night in Asgard when he had spent the night in his mother's mansion during the Convergence.
"Why are you tormenting the professor?" Jean angrily demanded. She had felt around everywhere with her powers but only felt nothingness in this space. The professor was nowhere to be found. Yet she knew her previous actions didn't break him out.
"I did not force him to enter my mind. That was his own mistake. You want me to just brush aside that he tried to alter my thoughts or read all my memories?"
"How is torturing him with painful memories an appropriate response!?"
"Oh, what is? An eye for an eye? I twist his mind in return because I'm stronger?" Eli asked with a frown of his own.
"Can't you just be the bigger man and let it go?" Jean angrily retorted, uncomfortable with the conclusion her outburst had caused.
"And let Charles off scot-free without consequences? Clearly, he thought himself above others, free to do as he pleases with my mind because he has the power to do so. Well, I have the power to do what I please, too. And I want to give him a taste of his own medicine," Eli answered with a shrug.
Desperate to free the man who raised her, Jean tried to start a battle of the minds with Eli, but they were currently in the Asgardian's mindscape. His own turf so to speak, and it was reinforced for these occasions with magic, runes, and his own mind powers. It would take a vastly more powerful and extensively better coordinated attack to break his mind from within.
"You made the same mistake as Charles. Sure, you're both probably unrivaled among mutants with your telepathy. Put you entered the mind of an Asgardian sorcerer. An Asgardian sorcerer with his own seed of psionic powers. There was never a chance for you to win," Eli declared as he closed a fist to restrain the red-haired telepath with his psionic powers.
As Eli made it so the mutant had to watch Charles suffer over and over, Jean's worries grew and grew. Suddenly, her eyes started to turn fiery red, and a powerful pressure started to spread through Eli's mindscape. With furrowed brows, Eli ejected both mutants from his mind before the pressure could grow any further. He saw no reason to gamble with something that clearly felt ancient.
"Stay out of my mind," Eli ordered as he turned around to board his ship again while storing the bigger of the two through an illusion of casting an invisibility spell on it.
Wolverine looked toward the panting Jean and Charles with worry but ultimately boarded the ship with the rest of the previous base-raid-crew. Instead of Moira, they were joined by Ororo 'Storm' Munroe. Had they given the X-Men more time to think about it, maybe some others would have joined as well, but Eli no longer cared much for this place after the school's principal left such a terrible first impression.
Their destination this time was a seemingly random anti mutant camp run by the Friends of Humanity, a hate group advocating against mutants that Fisk helped fund. Eli knew about it because he ripped it out of Fisk's mind before breaking it.
The flight over was quiet, and only Quintavius, aka Kid Omega, tried to lift the mood by cracking a few jokes. Initially, Storm wanted to use this time to learn more about Eli, but it looked like the man wasn't in the mood for talking.
This time around, everything was a little more bloody. This camp was clearly just to satisfy some sadistic urges and not for scientific 'progress'. Children were chained in medieval torture devices instead of lab equipment. Since he was in a bad mood anyway, Eli immediately used his powers to break bones to immobilize the enemies instead of just killing them. Nobody had anything else to do other than rescuing as many kids as possible, while Eli gathered everyone with more knowledge about the FoH and their bases and camps.
He broke a few minds, though he was careful enough to leave these people with some kind of consciousness. Just so he could cast some more unending nightmares. He gathered a few phones, used his Sovereign tech phone to hack them, and immediately posted all the twisted torture videos these guys had recorded on their social media with blurred faces of the victims. If this didn't garner a collective hate for this disgusting group of individuals, nothing would. Because for four more bases of the Friends of Humanity, Eli did the same. The internet was flooded with videos of children being tortured at the hands of the Friends of Humanity that day.
Eli had ordered an alien-tech laptop specifically for this trip for just such occasions. Anya had made use of it and brought it to hack a few computers at the bases and posted the connections of several senators, other officials, and celebrities to the hate group, too. Their careers likely wouldn't take a big hit before it really mattered, because these people wouldn't live for long. It was more to show just how much mutants were getting shafted in this society.
A day later, the mutants in their group, save for Wolverine, were resting on the ship when Anya and Eli were still going strong. They reached a base that housed the final leader of the Friends of Humanity they hadn't yet killed, Dr. Stephen Lang. However, this time around the base didn't house any captured mutants. No, Stephen Lang appeared to be doing actual research.
Though, the goal of this research wasn't any less disastrous for mutants than using their kind as lab rats or torture victims. Stephen Lang was developing the ultimate anti-mutant weapon, Sentinels.
According to Wolverine, Sentinels were the brainchild of the late Bolivar Trask. Killer robots that could detect their kind and continuously adapt to counter mutant powers. Trask was killed by Mystique two decades ago, but the idea for the sentinels sadly survived its inventor.
After they were done with FoH, they already had the next lead for Trask Industries and a like-minded hate group called 'Humanity's Last Stand' led by Simon Trask, Bolivar Trask's younger brother and by all accounts a deranged terrorist who killed countless people and framed mutants for doing it.
Back at the FoH base led by Stephen Lang, Eli vented his anger differently than before. He unleashed Shatterstar and killed every researcher present while holding the sword himself. He might have stretched his promise to Steve a little with his actions this time around because, technically, not all of these researchers had laid a hand on mutants. However, they all knew what their work would do when it was finished. Clearly, they were hoping for a form of genocide even at the cost of killing countless children.
When Eli reached Lang in his personal laboratory, the maniac was spewing his hate, but his monologue was cut short when Eli jumped forward in a blinding show of superior speed and impaled the scientist's head with Shatterstar.
As the man fell backward with an indredulous look and a sword running through his head, a gigantic robot stirred to life from inside a rocket that was apparently being prepared to send the machine into space. From Lang's mind, Eli learned that this was a Master Mold. The source of all sentinels created by Bolivar Trask and possibly an artifact of an alien civilization. Lang never bothered to confirm. That part was just a sidenote in Trask's research Lang was provided. Sadly, Eli learned there was more than one of these molds, so simply destroying this one was only the first step of many. How many he sadly couldn't confirm because Lang did not know.
"Systems online. Scanning assailant. Error, assailant not mutant in nature," the robot proclaimed without emotion.
Eli looked at the giant robot in full dismissal. He tried to check it for anomalities like a mind and actually found one. Well, the seed for one, it was still budding. Truly, this machine was a feat beyond humans of this era.
When he learned everything he could with his powers, Eli charged up his destroyer arm, calmly walked forward, and pressed the glowing green hand on the armor of the mold. The mold lit up from the point of contact, trying 'desperately' to adapt to the energy, but before it managed to do it, Eli unleashed a storm of magical energies that ravaged the Master Mold.
Once almost completely destroyed, it tried to make it look like an inner part of the machine was shot out because of the damage inflicted, but Eli wouldn't let any piece of this machine stay in one piece and caught it with his telekinesis. He brought it in front of his eyes glowing in pale green and noticed that it suspiciously looked like some form of entirely intact processor module.
With narrowed eyes, Eli thought about how crafty this invention was and crushed this 'brain module', as he dubbed it in his mind, with his hand and further destroyed any and all molecules of this processor as best he could. Just out of spite.
"That was clearly the head honcho. Why kill him instead of casting that nightmare spell on him? Surely he deserved it," Wolverine spoke up from behind him as the clawed former X-Man inspected the remains of the Master Mold with a frown.
"Torturing someone before their imminent death is for the sole satisfaction of the one torturing. I am out of gaining satisfaction through that for today. Also, that seemed like the quickest way to never hear his annoying voice ever again," Eli dispassionately spoke.
"You don't look tired. But kid, you look weary. Maybe you should sit the next base out and enjoy some time with your lovely girl. She looks a little worried, too," Wolverine suggested in a rare moment of accurate judgment of social and emotional nuances after inspecting Eli for a good minute.
"Yeah. Maybe I will. I got a little carried away after seeing so much filth in their minds all day," Eli agreed with a tired sigh. "Our Earth has its fair share of darkness. But this Friends of Humanity group... they skinned children alive thinking it served some greater good," he continued with sunken shoulders and downturned eyes.
"Come here," Anya softly spoke as Eli returned to the ship. They were done cleaning up the base and gathering all the evidence to be posted online later.
Floating as to avoid trudging over with heavy steps, Eli fell into Anya's open arms for a gentle hug.
"You once told me; 'it might not look like it, but after getting through today, tomorrow is going to look a little better.' You've seen all this hate and suffering today, but you also made it so that there's going to be less of it tomorrow. Maybe not for you, but for all these kids we saved," Anya reassuringly spoke while pushing Eli's head to the crook of her neck and brushing his hair with her fingers.
"Yeah. Tomorrow has to be better..."