In desperate situations, humanity could sometimes perform miracles.
A weak mother might suddenly lift a car to save her child.
A father might break down a door and rush inside a burning building, and carry out his family despite a broken leg.
One could say that the human body was weak, but one could never say it lacked potential. Humanity had immense potential, but few could ever unlock it.
It took immense pressure and a powerful will.
Those who dared to call themselves heroes, those who willingly stepped onto that thankless path, those who didn't just dare to call themselves a hero, but those who also rose to embody that role, they had a will of iron.
And as heroes, one had to face impossible odds, not just for oneself, but also for others.
These two facts meant that heroes were uniquely suited to unleash their full potential.
A normal person might be able to unleash strength beyond their normal limits, to shrug off wounds and pain without slowing down.
But for a mutant?
Unleashing their full potential meant something far different, far greater.
While mutants had different abilities, they all had one thing in common: they had a power that wasn't limited by the normal laws of physics as humans understood them.
This was the reason mutants existed; they were the next step of human evolution.
Now if one combined the will of a hero with the potential of a mutant...
The results could be divine, or demonic.
Ororo was one such case.
Her ability to control the weather was something she was born with, and with training, she had learned to use it with great skill.
But for her to conjure a storm as large as the one she had summoned, to keep it going, and to fight the Sentinels at the same time, was something far beyond her normal limits.
It was a miracle.
But it wasn't one without a cost.
The storm was a force of nature, and nature was wild and untamed, yet she did the impossible; she tamed nature and brought its wrath onto her enemies.
Such a thing was both difficult and demanding on her, requiring everything she had and more.
The Sentinels were just that difficult to deal with. They constantly deployed weapons and tools to try and bring them down, try and break them, and so they had to push past their limits just to hold on.
She wasn't the only one, either; all of them were giving it their all, pushing themselves past anything they had in the past, and thanks to this, they were still standing.
Well, some of them were still standing; many also fell, their lives barely saved, but taken out of the fight altogether.
Thankfully, their sacrifices weren't meaningless; they managed to slowly whittle down the number of enemies, which allowed the remaining fighters to barely hold on.
Jean Grey felt the desperation, she felt the pain, the fear of her friends, their emotions battered against her mind, yet she could do nothing to shut them out.
She was, without a doubt, the strongest mutant here, even stronger than the professor who remained inside the school.
Jean's power wasn't limited to manipulating the mind; she could turn her thoughts into power.
Her anger turned into insurmountable blasts that slammed into the Sentinels, her love into shields to protect her friends, or carry them out of harm's way.
Never before had she pushed her power this far, far beyond what she had ever thought possible.
Yet the more she pushed, the more she found. It seemed like her power was limitless; she was merely at the limit of what she knew, what she could control, not what she had.
As she came to this realization, she couldn't help but regret never learning this sooner. If she had, if she knew how to fully use her powers, wouldn't she have been able to do more?
But it was too late to regret it; all she could do now was use it and fight.
Yet, this was not a gift without a price.
She didn't have full control over these new powers. She remembered the professor always telling them to be careful, to not use their powers recklessly, lest they end up causing harm.
She had heard him tell this to both herself and many others, and he had always been right.
So many young children had caused problems by using their powers carelessly, causing unexpected effects and damage.
It was an important lesson for a reason, all the more so since the stronger the power, the greater the potential for something going wrong, and the worse it could become.
Even now, she felt strained, sweat beading on her skin, her face locked in a look of pain.
This wasn't because she, like the others, was squeezing out every bit of her powers, but instead because she struggled to keep everything she was unleashing under control.
Because just beyond her control was something she could only describe as immense.
Power beyond measure.
Beyond imagination.
And it was hungry.
It wanted to be let out.
A faint psychic echo resonated from her, a subconscious cry for help that only one person could hear.
Charles.
His fight might be against the robots, but he couldn't help but feel her cry, and for the first time in many years, he felt true fear.
Because he wasn't afraid of the Sentinels, nor was he afraid for the lives of the children, or of the school.
No, he was afraid for Jean, because he knew what was inside her.
It was a secret that even Jean herself didn't know, one that he kept from her for her own safety.
Because inside her was a power so great that it could destroy them all.
Never before had he seen such power, at least not until he saw Arthuria Pendragon. It wasn't until he saw her actions that he fully started to understand just how powerful Jean was.
A power he knew she couldn't control, and so out of safety, he had sealed it away in the depths of her own mind.
Yet, he had long since realized that his actions back then were a mistake, because that power had only grown stronger after being forcefully bottled up, and now he dared not think about what would happen if it was ever released.
He had always intended for that seal to be temporary, to last only until she was older and able to start training and controlling it.
Yet by the time she was old enough, the power had grown too strong, and so he waited longer, and Jean never disappointed, always growing better in her control, yet the growth of her control never reached that of the power inside her.
Forcing him to always delay and delay, until he had to accept that it could never be released.
Not even here, not even against the Sentinels, because that power inside her was the greater of two evils.
As he sat in his office, looking out at the ruined school grounds, his home getting torn apart in the fighting, he couldn't help but sigh.
He did his best to shield her even now, to try and block out the thoughts of others, to ensure she wouldn't lose control. It was all he could do now, because his main focus was far away from here.
He would do what was necessary; he wouldn't let these young ones die for him, nor because of him.
It would break every moral boundary he had ever set for himself, it would shatter all the trust he had built through years of restraint and compromise.
But... for the future, he was willing to sacrifice himself.
"Just a little longer... Almost there..." he whispered to himself, hoping and praying they would last. These students of his had never disappointed him before, and they wouldn't do so now either.
He trusted them.
Not because he had to, but because he knew them. He trusted them.
Outside on the grass, the fighting was going on. One by one, the Sentinels were taken down, broken apart, ripped apart, blasted apart, frozen, burned, melted.
Everything they could do, they did, yet even as they fell, the pressure never grew any lighter, because even as the enemies fell in number, so too did they.
More and more were forced to pull back.
"Alicia!" Scott shouted as he saw her get struck hard by the arm of a Sentinel as it exploded, sending fragments everywhere.
"I got her," Kurt appeared with the familiar smell of sulfur, catching the girl before they both disappeared.
Yet, despite seeing her be saved, Scott felt no relief, because he had seen Kurt. On one side, this likely meant he was done with the evacuation.
But on the other hand, he saw what he had been reduced to: blood leaking out of his nose, his eyes red and bloodshot.
It seemed a miracle that he was still breathing, and yet he was still working so hard.
"I can't let this go on," Scott whispered, yet he also knew he couldn't stop. Not yet.
He knew it as much as the others did. Every Sentinel they destroyed here meant one less Sentinel to threaten others elsewhere. They were the only ones on this entire planet, aside from Magneto, who could fight these things.
The world's other heroes were busy, dealing with their own problems, yet even if they had been free, what could they do?
Captain America was strong, but a single blast from a Sentinel would kill him, and even if it didn't, he couldn't break the armor. The Hulk might have had the strength to do it, but he was a mindless beast who would cause as much destruction as the Sentinels.
Tony Stark's armor was powerful, but it wasn't powerful enough, not against an army.
No, only mutants could fight mutants, and these were anti-mutant machines.
It was their war, and they had to fight it.
So he pushed, red blasts of pure energy shot from his eyes, blood running down his face. The eyes were such a delicate part of the body, so easily damaged.
Yet now he cared not for the damage, so what if he might go blind, if he might die? Did the others care about such things?
No, they didn't.
He had been a coward, holding back while others were breaking themselves.
Now, he was done holding back, and while each blast felt like a blade was shoved into his eyes, he kept firing without pause, each blast stronger than the last.
White plasma, red blasts, blue lightning, all these filled the air.
And finally, finally the last Sentinel fell to the ground and stopped moving, finally... the battle was over.
Scott knelt on the ground, gasping for breath.
Not a single person could stand, even Ororo finally fell from the sky, and Jean collapsed, the psychic pressure she had been under finally vanishing as the enemies were gone.
"Jean!" Scott shouted in worry, rushing to her side.
He didn't care that he could barely see, he didn't care that the world was spinning, he only cared about her.
He reached her side and held her in his arms.
"I'm fine," she whispered, her voice hoarse.
He could see that she was not fine, but he also knew she would not die. He could feel that her heart was still beating, that she was still breathing.
He held her close, his own pain forgotten, and then he looked around, at the destruction, at the bodies, at the blood.
So much destruction.
So much pain.
And why?
Because some people hated them, wanted them dead simply for being different. That hurt more than anything else.
But... at least they won...
"No!"
Scott heard a gasp; he couldn't make out who said it over the wind from Ororo's storm, but he could hear the despair in it.
He turned his head, every movement painful, and despite the damage to his eyes, he saw what had caused that gasp.
There, in the distance, black shadows were flying towards them, a red light on their heads.
Sentinels.
Tens of them...
No...
Hundreds of them...
A storm of machines.
He had been so sure that they had won, that they had held on for long enough.
He had been such a fool.
They hadn't held on for anything; all they did was break themselves, and for what?
So that another bigger group could come and finish the job.
They had lost.
This realization, more than any wound, more than any pain, broke him.
And as he looked at the black clouds of death closing in, he could only hope that the end would be quick.
"Kurt, get everyone away, now!" Charles ordered mentally, and the teleporter, ignoring the pain, running only on the experimental stimulant, did as he was told.
One by one, every last mutant disappeared from the school, just before the net closed, before the countless layers of X-gene suppressors had them in their range.
Charles was the last to go. He heard the sound, felt the hand land on his shoulder, and outside his window, he saw the army of Sentinels and a black shadow cutting through the clouds from above.
And then, he heard a confluence of voices, people rushing around, paramedics shouting as the ground was covered with the X-Men who were receiving treatment.
This wasn't how he imagined he would arrive in Albion.
(End of chapter)
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