"Good."
Steve's voice disappeared from my ear as the connection closed, leaving only the faint sounds of movement around us and the distant groaning of tortured metal somewhere deeper within the Nexus.
For a moment, I simply continued walking.
The Sentinels had made their move.
They had attacked Albion, Stark's facilities, mutant settlements, cities, and almost everything else they believed might give one of us a reason to turn around. It had been a perfectly reasonable strategy, one that would likely have worked only a day ago, when every defender on Earth was already stretched far beyond what they could reasonably handle.
But things were different now.
Asgard had entered the war.
My knights had returned.
The Enforcement Knights that had survived Hell were once again spread across Albion, and the forces that had spent weeks desperately attempting to survive were no longer alone.
For perhaps the first time since the Sentinel crisis began, there were enough defenders to be everywhere that mattered.
Which meant we could continue forward.
Tony glanced toward me from behind his helmet, clearly having heard only my half of the conversation. "I'm guessing that sounded better on your end than it did on mine?"
"Asgard has entered the conflict," I informed him as we continued down the corridor. "The primary attack against Albion has already stalled, and Sentinel forces elsewhere are beginning to redirect toward them."
Tony was silent for half a second before nodding. "So Loki's big surprise worked."
"Quite well."
"Good." He looked ahead toward the darkness and flexed one armored hand, the repulsor in his palm glowing faintly. "Then I guess we keep going."
"That was always the intention."
Reed glanced briefly toward Tony before returning his attention to the small device in his hands. The equipment had been constantly scanning the Nexus since we entered, gathering whatever scraps of information the machines allowed us to see, though judging by the increasingly troubled expression upon his face, what he was learning wasn't particularly comforting.
"The network is changing again," he finally said.
Tony immediately looked toward him. "Changing how?"
"I'm not entirely sure yet."
That was never a reassuring answer coming from Reed Richards.
We had travelled considerably deeper into the Nexus by now, passing through enough reinforced doors and security barriers that I had long since stopped counting them. The architecture around us had changed as well.
What had begun as a human-built bunker, all poured concrete, steel supports, maintenance corridors, and practical military engineering, had gradually become something else.
The Sentinels had rebuilt their home.
Metal covered much of the original concrete now, smooth black material spreading over walls and ceilings in irregular patterns, while thick cables disappeared into openings that had clearly not existed when the structure was first constructed. Some were no wider than a finger, others thicker than my arm, and every so often I could see something beneath the outer coverings that looked unpleasantly organic.
Reed noticed me looking.
"Some of it is Chitauri-derived," he explained, reaching toward one of the exposed sections without quite touching it. "Or at least based upon the same principles. Biological material used to assist data transmission and coordination."
"Like the pieces inside the Sentinels?" Mordred asked.
"Similar, yes."
Mordred stared at the fleshy material for a moment before his face twisted in disgust. "Machines should be machines."
"I don't think they care much about aesthetics," Tony replied.
"It's disgusting."
"That I agree with."
Magneto had been considerably quieter since the attacks against the mutant settlements began, though he had continued forward without hesitation. Now he raised one hand toward the wall, his fingers moving slightly as he felt the enormous amount of metal buried around us.
"It extends everywhere," he said. "The original structure is almost completely surrounded by it. Walls within walls, tunnels beyond the ones we're walking through, entire chambers filled with machinery."
Reed looked toward him. "Can you sense the core?"
Erik shook his head. "There is too much metal. It would be like asking someone to identify a single drop of water while standing beneath the ocean."
Still, I could feel something.
Not through the metal.
Not through magic either, at least not entirely.
It was the same strange presence I had noticed when looking across Albion before unleashing Rhongomyniad, only now there was no distance separating us. It existed all around us, watching through cameras and sensors buried within the walls, following our movements with an attention that felt almost tangible.
A machine shouldn't have felt like that.
Or perhaps that was merely my own bias.
Humans often assumed that anything which thought as they did must somehow resemble them, yet thought itself was hardly limited to flesh.
Gods thought. Spirits thought. Elementals thought. Even worlds could possess something resembling thought if they became sufficiently old and powerful.
Why not a machine?
The question of whether the Sentinel intelligence had developed a soul remained unanswered.
The question of whether I would kill it if it had was not.
A faint click echoed through the corridor.
I stopped.
So did my knights.
Tony and Reed reacted a fraction of a second later, while Magneto merely raised his hand.
Nothing happened.
For several seconds, the corridor remained completely silent.
Then Tony looked around. "Anyone else hear that?"
"Yes," Gawain answered.
"What was it?"
The answer came when every light in the corridor suddenly disappeared.
Darkness swallowed us completely.
It hardly mattered to me or my knights, but Tony's armor immediately switched to another spectrum while Reed activated a small light attached to his suit.
Then the floor vanished.
Or rather, it opened.
Metal panels pulled apart beneath Tony and Reed with enough speed that neither had time to react before both began falling into the darkness below.
Lancelot caught Tony.
Gawain caught Reed.
Both knights moved so quickly that the trap had barely finished opening before the two mortals were already standing safely upon solid ground again.
Tony looked down into the pit.
Far below, something glowed.
Then a beam of brilliant energy shot upward.
Gawain moved first, dragging Reed away while Lancelot did the same with Tony. The beam passed between them and struck the ceiling, carving through several meters of reinforced material before disappearing somewhere above.
Tony stared at the hole.
"Okay," he muttered. "That would've hurt."
"It was aimed specifically at you and Sir Richards," Agravain observed.
"No kidding."
The floor began closing again.
Mordred stepped forward and brought Clarent down before the mechanism could finish moving, the sword passing through the thick metal as though it were little more than wood. The entire section collapsed into the chamber below with a tremendous crash, followed by the distant sound of something exploding.
"Problem solved," he announced.
Reed looked considerably less satisfied.
"No."
Mordred turned toward him. "No?"
"It's learning."
"We already knew that."
"Not like this."
Reed stepped toward the edge of the ruined floor and looked down into the darkness. "The Sentinels outside are attacking population centres and important locations because they know those targets can make us reconsider the assault. Inside, it's doing the same thing on a smaller scale."
Tony understood first.
"It's not trying to kill Arthuria."
"Or the knights," Reed agreed. "It knows that's inefficient."
His eyes moved toward himself and Tony.
"It's trying to remove the people necessary to interact with the core."
That made sense.
Destroying me was beyond its current abilities.
Killing my knights was scarcely easier.
But Tony and Reed?
For all their intelligence, all their technology, and all the incredible things they had accomplished, both were still fundamentally mortal.
And we needed at least one of them alive.
"It has correctly identified the weakest points in our formation," Agravain said.
Tony looked offended. "Weakest is a strong word."
"You nearly fell into a hole."
"I can fly."
"You did not."
"My suit was recalibrating."
"Naturally."
Tony stared at him for a moment before apparently deciding that arguing with Mordred was unlikely to improve his mood.
We continued.
The traps became more frequent from that point onward.
The intelligence had apparently abandoned any hope of stopping all of us and instead concentrated almost exclusively upon Reed and Tony.
Hidden emitters released electromagnetic pulses powerful enough to make Tony's armor flicker for several seconds before the systems he and Reed had designed adapted. Sections of corridor suddenly filled with superheated gas, only for Tristan to destroy the vents before the temperature could rise enough to threaten anyone. Another chamber attempted to seal itself and remove the atmosphere completely, which achieved little beyond forcing us to destroy yet another expensive door.
The most effective attempt came when the anti-mutant equipment surrounding the Nexus abruptly changed frequency.
Magneto staggered.
Only once.
But that alone was enough to draw everyone's attention.
Erik caught himself against the wall, one hand going to his head while the metal around us suddenly stopped responding to his power.
"Erik?" Reed asked.
"I'm fine."
"You don't look fine."
"I said I'm fine."
Tony immediately began working through the controls within his armor. "Their suppression field changed. Reed?"
"I see it."
The two of them started modifying whatever protective technology they had developed over the past weeks, exchanging information so quickly that I understood perhaps half of what they were saying.
The Sentinels didn't give them time.
The walls opened.
Machines poured out.
Not hundreds.
Perhaps twenty.
Small models, barely taller than a man and considerably lighter than the enormous Sentinels that had fought above ground. Their weapons immediately locked onto Magneto, Reed, and Tony.
None targeted me.
Mordred seemed almost personally offended.
"Again?"
Then he disappeared.
The first Sentinel came apart before its weapon finished charging.
Gawain destroyed the second.
Lancelot moved through three more in a single motion, Arondight leaving silver lines behind him as metal bodies separated into pieces.
Tristan barely moved at all. Failnaught sang once, and two Sentinels attempting to retreat into the walls collapsed as holes appeared directly through their cores.
The entire attack lasted perhaps four seconds.
Tony slowly lowered the arm he had raised.
"Did I even need to come armed?"
"Yes," Reed replied without looking up from his equipment.
"Starting to question that."
"Done."
A small device attached to Magneto's clothing flashed.
Erik inhaled sharply.
Then every remaining fragment of Sentinel metal in the corridor rose from the ground.
His expression darkened.
"I dislike these machines."
With a closing motion of his hand, every piece crushed itself into a compact sphere.
His powers had returned.
We continued.
Eventually, however, even the traps stopped.
No more Sentinels emerged from the walls. No hidden weapons fired. No floors vanished beneath our feet, nor did more strange gases or anti-mutant pulses suddenly flood the corridors. Even the lights returned, illuminating a long passage that stretched perhaps a hundred meters ahead before ending at a single enormous door.
Unlike the others we had encountered, this one bore no visible lock.
No control panel.
No defensive batteries guarded it, nor did any mechanism seem prepared to spring another trap the moment we approached.
It simply waited.
Reed slowed first.
Tony did the same a heartbeat later, while my knights spread around them almost automatically, weapons ready and senses sharpened, all of us expecting the enemy to make one final attempt before we reached its heart.
Nothing happened.
I could feel the presence beyond the door now more clearly than ever before.
Closer.
Far closer.
This was it.
"The core?" Tony asked, his voice quieter than before, as though even he felt the weight of the place pressing down upon us.
Reed studied the readings from the equipment in his hands for several seconds before nodding slowly. "It has to be. Every signal is converging here."
Mordred stepped forward and raised Clarent slightly. "Want me to open it?"
"No."
Everyone looked toward me, though I had not spoken loudly.
I stared at the door.
Something on the other side stared back.
For several seconds, neither side moved.
Then, without any of us touching it, the great door split cleanly down the middle and withdrew silently into the walls.
Tony's helmet turned toward me. "That's not ominous at all."
I stepped through first.
The chamber beyond was immense.
It was far larger than should reasonably have fit beneath the structure above, though by this point I had long since given up expecting the Nexus to obey anything resembling reasonable dimensions. The walls disappeared into the darkness far to either side, while the ceiling vanished so high above us that it was almost lost in shadow. Thick cables as large as tree trunks descended from above and rose from below, all of them converging upon a gigantic structure standing at the centre of the room.
At first glance, it resembled some monstrous fusion of factory, server tower, and execution scaffold.
Black metal plating covered most of its surface, layered again and again into overlapping shells thicker than castle walls, while countless red lights pulsed across it like veins beneath skin. Massive support columns surrounded it, holding thick cables and mechanical braces in place, and there were enough weapons built into the surrounding chamber that the entire room looked ready to turn into a fortress at a moment's notice.
Reed stopped dead.
Tony did the same.
Even Magneto stared.
"This..." Reed whispered, his voice caught somewhere between alarm and fascination.
Tony's helmet retracted with a hiss, exposing his face as he looked up at the impossible machine before us. "That's not a server."
"No," Reed said quietly, still staring. "No, it isn't."
I understood what he meant.
This was no mere core.
What stood before us had once perhaps been intended as the heart of the Sentinel network, a great processing engine buried beneath the earth and protected by layers of steel and weapons.
But sometime during these past weeks—perhaps long before them—it had become something else.
The shape was wrong for a machine meant only to think.
Or rather, it was wrong until one stopped trying to see a machine and began to see a body.
What I had first taken for support columns were not supports at all.
They were legs.
Enormous legs, folded and locked in place beneath the structure, each one so large that a mortal building could have been built inside them. The heavy protrusions along its sides were not armored housings for secondary systems, but arms folded inward against its body, each thicker than a shipping container and ending in hands large enough to crush tanks like toys.
Even the upper section, which at first had resembled little more than some armored command tower, slowly resolved itself into a head and torso hunched forward in unnatural stillness.
It was a Sentinel.
A colossal one.
A giant machine the size of a multi-story building, hidden beneath the Nexus as Trask's ultimate weapon and final surprise.
Tony let out a slow breath. "Oh, you've got to be kidding me."
"No," Reed said, though his eyes never left the machine. "This explains the energy readings, the data throughput, the material consumption, all of it. The central intelligence isn't housed inside the Nexus."
He swallowed.
"The Nexus is housing it."
That was an important difference.
This was not a command center with a machine at its heart.
The entire facility had been built around this thing.
Fed into it.
Strengthened it.
Protected it.
And all across its enormous body, cables and braces remained locked in place like restraints, as though even the Sentinels themselves had understood that fully waking such a thing before the proper moment would be a risk.
A sound rolled through the chamber.
Not the hiss of hydraulics, nor merely the groaning of metal under strain.
It was the sound of something awakening.
One by one, the red lights across the giant Sentinel's body brightened.
Then more followed.
The enormous braces holding its limbs in place began to disengage with thunderous crashes, one after another, as locking mechanisms the size of houses released.
The entire chamber shook.
Dust rained from the ceiling.
Somewhere behind us, Tony muttered something decidedly unheroic.
The Sentinel's head lifted.
Its eyes ignited.
The presence I had felt throughout the Nexus, that cold intelligence watching us from every wall and every camera, suddenly focused itself into a single point.
A voice echoed through the vast chamber, not from hidden speakers this time, but from the giant machine itself, deep and resonant enough that the floor trembled beneath each word.
"Arthuria Pendragon."
My knights raised their weapons instantly.
Magneto stepped forward, metal already shivering around him.
Tony's armor snapped closed again, and beside him, Reed took an involuntary step back before steadying himself.
I merely looked up at the giant before us.
So.
That was Trask's answer.
Not merely an intelligence.
Not merely a network.
But a king-slaying weapon waiting at the heart of his war.
And now it was awake.
(End of chapter)
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