Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters reopened!
The mutant students who had been staying at the Hepburn residence and on the twelfth floor in Tribeca returned to the school in Westchester County aboard proper buses this time.
Compared with their previous escape, when they had been crammed into the cargo compartment of a truck like livestock, it was a considerable improvement.
With so many people suddenly gone from the house, the fun-loving old child was genuinely disappointed for several days.
Katherine Hepburn continued ordering an excessive amount of breakfast as though the mutant children were still there, only for it all to end up in the Kryptonian's stomach.
Sky was another person who felt disappointed.
There had been a group of children younger than her.
Although every one of them had extraordinary talents, none of them could hide their envy when they saw Sky walking around holding a tiger's paw or even riding on Kitty's back.
Not just anyone could ride Kitty.
People really shouldn't treat this enormous creature like a "tabby cat."
It wasn't a playground attraction.
The moment they were frightened by that enormous bloody maw and its pungent breath, every child would burst into tears.
Even when Grandma beat the tabby cat while scolding it, "Bad kitty!" it was completely useless.
Grandma's destructive power was effectively zero against Kitty.
No matter how many times she hit it, Kitty didn't feel a thing.
Kitty simply couldn't understand why refusing to let those unfamiliar two-legged cubs ride on its back had somehow earned it a scolding.
In any case, as the only child who could get close to Kitty, Sky had vaguely become something like the leader of the children, enjoying an elevated status among the mutant kids.
Of course, Sky had also benefited from favorable circumstances.
Most of the children Katherine Hepburn had kept at home were younger kids who needed someone to look after them.
Even Sky was addressed as "Big Sister."
If a few children of the same age or close to it had stayed at the Hepburn residence, Henry suspected they would have gotten into an all-out catfight with Sky.
He would have started wondering whether the girls had been raised wrong.
In any case, the children returned to school.
As the principal, Professor X even made a special trip to East Forty-Ninth Street to personally express his thanks.
Naturally, he used Quicksilver's version of the story: when the school had suffered a disaster, fortunately Ms. Hepburn and Mr. Brown had temporarily taken in the boarding students.
Professor X wasn't tactless enough to ask who the Wild Boar man who had attacked the Alkali Lake base was.
He certainly wasn't about to invade this extraterrestrial's mind again and enjoy another round of involuntary brain-burning.
The exchange between the two sides was strictly formal.
Katherine Hepburn had seen enough of Hollywood's formal and informal parties to be perfectly familiar with this sort of thing.
The two sides naturally observed proper etiquette and stopped at the appropriate point.
And the person pushing Professor X's wheelchair was Storm.
It wasn't one of the hot-tempered X-Men who would immediately want to fight Henry upon seeing him.
Much less was it Jean Grey, who was currently like an unpredictable time bomb.
As for the fact that the U.S. government had nearly declared war on the mutant population within its own borders, it never made the news.
Not a single rumor leaked out.
Everyone who knew about it maintained a remarkably tacit silence.
Because another matter connected to the incident—the political coup brewing within the highest levels of government—had also arisen quietly and settled quietly.
The Bush family was one of the most powerful families in American politics, with blood ties to more than a dozen U.S. presidents, though most of those connections were through marriage.
The Bush family's influence was in no way inferior to that of the Kennedy family at the height of its power in the previous century.
If anything, it was even greater.
Now, with father and son having both served as President two generations apart, though not consecutively, it could be regarded as the culmination of the Bush family's accumulated political power—a sudden demonstration of everything that power had built toward.
After all, the last father-and-son pair of U.S. Presidents had been John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers, and his son, John Quincy Adams.
A President from a family like this had nearly been assassinated!
It was easy to imagine how intense the investigation and retaliation behind the scenes would be.
Naturally, this wasn't something that could be made public.
It was even less conceivable that they would make a grand spectacle of it and let the entire world know.
Especially with the United States on the eve of launching its war against Iraq.
The military, defense industry, and oil conglomerates supporting the war were all hungrily eyeing the Middle East like a fat piece of meat.
If someone chose this moment to drag the country down from within, what sort of treatment would that person receive?
William Stryker was already dead.
If he hadn't been, the military itself would probably have dealt with him.
They wouldn't have gone all out to protect him, and his fate certainly wouldn't have been pleasant.
There was no denying that the things he had done over the years had been tacitly permitted by the military.
They had even been happy to see them happen.
But that didn't give William Stryker the right to overturn the banquet table just as everyone was preparing to serve the main course.
But he was dead.
William Stryker's legacy was quickly divided among the military's senior figures.
His direct subordinates were dismantled and dispersed, his files were sealed, and it was as though this man had never existed in the U.S. Army.
As for revenge…
Without the man, what reason was there for revenge?
Even if someone wanted to avenge William Stryker simply to preserve the military's dignity and demonstrate that the U.S. military could not be violated, the moment they proposed digging up that "Wild Boar," the Bush camp would likely regard such an action as evidence of collusion with Stryker.
Then a coordinated crackdown would follow.
At best, the person would be sidelined and left to rot.
At worst, they would disappear permanently.
Nothing was more hated than a traitor.
That was the central principle operating beneath the surface of American politics at the time.
Especially when the country was preparing for war abroad.
If everyone wasn't united behind a common purpose, how could anything be accomplished?
Naturally, those who weren't of one mind had to be eliminated first…
And so a military figure who had caused mutants trouble for years disappeared without a sound.
Everyone avoided discussing him.
Even if William Stryker hadn't been killed by the Wild Boar armor, once his actions were exposed, the United States would have initiated an internal purge.
Perhaps even more people would have died then.
The reason the purge was so severe was also to intimidate the accomplice who had never exposed himself—the "successor to the presidency" mentioned in the coup plan.
George Bush hadn't chosen to investigate every cabinet official eligible to succeed him, including the running mate who had been elected alongside him.
But neither did he blindly choose to trust those people.
He simply treated William Stryker as the chicken being killed to frighten the monkeys.
Whether or not the monkeys were trembling in fear, they should understand one thing:
If anyone was foolish enough to stick their neck out, or if they later committed some offense through carelessness, the chicken's fate would become the monkey's fate.
No exceptions.
There was no generous forgiveness.
Instead, there was a sword of Damocles hanging over everyone's head, ready to fall at any moment upon anyone who made a mistake.
The President of the United States might be a representative of certain interest groups, or even a puppet controlled by powerful conglomerates.
But ultimately, he was still the man who held the nuclear launch codes.
He wasn't some disposable piece of toilet paper.
If that red line was crossed, there were few people in this world who could withstand the President of the United States when he retaliated with absolute resolve.
To calm the storm stirred up by William Stryker, many people were forced to surrender considerable interests in exchange for the Bush family's silence.
And so this political storm in a teapot quietly ended, without the public ever noticing.
However, none of this had anything to do with Henry.
With one major threat removed, his days became considerably more carefree.
Even the ordinary sunlight seemed much more pleasant.
The only thing that warranted any extra attention from him was the upcoming Iraq War.
There was no news of the Ten Rings participating in the conflict.
The Anglo-American coalition in this world was just like the one in the history Henry remembered from before his transmigration.
It swept into Baghdad with overwhelming force and captured Saddam Hussein alive.
It was essentially a war in which an adult beat up a child.
Even so, the United States used the conflict to once again demonstrate its posture as the power reigning supreme at the top of the world.
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