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The outer doors groaned and parted, metal teeth sliding back into the walls.
Leo had just shepherded the rescued mutants to the threshold when the figure stepped through and every instinct in him flared.
Tall, Corded muscle beneath pallid skin. A map of scars across a bald skull. No mouth at least, not one that could open. And those eyes… flat, remote, like a machine running a program.
Leo swore under his breath.
"Deadpool," he said.
"Wade!" Logan barked, disbelief and fury twisting his voice. He glanced at Leo, then called out louder, "Wade, is that you?"
Leo didn't look away from the thing advancing on them. "Logan… his mouth is sealed shut. How exactly do you expect him to answer?"
Logan's face hardened. "Great. Stryker finally found a way to shut up the biggest loudmouth on Earth."
Metal slid from bone with a sound like a switchblade snikt. Adamantium claws bloomed from Logan's fists.
Deadpool cocked his head, studying the claws. Then, to Leo's and Logan's combined horror, two thin, gleaming blades extruded from the creature's forearms adamantium katana sliding out along his middle fingers, as if his body were sheathing them.
Leo's stomach dropped. "Adamantium," he muttered. "Of course."
Logan didn't hesitate. "Leo get them out of here. I'll hold him."
"Move!" Leo shouted to the cluster of terrified kids and weakened mutants. He pushed them down the corridor, kept himself between them and the doorway, and didn't stop until the last head disappeared around the bend.
Nobody noticed when he vanished.
He blinked back into the hall just in time to see Deadpool's blade punch through Logan's side.
Blood spattered gray concrete. Logan grunted, pivoted, and slammed a shoulder into the weaponized mutant, trying to buy half a breath.
Leo reappeared at Deadpool's flank and whipped a kick at his skull.
Bone cracked. The blow sent the creature skidding across the floor, his head twisted a full half-turn the wrong way. He lay facedown, limbs awkwardly sprawled.
"Done," Leo said, lowering his leg.
The thing pushed itself up. Vertebrae rolled under skin. The head rotated back into place with a wet click.
"Not that easy," Logan said through clenched teeth.
Deadpool's back was to them now. He went still statue. And then his head tilted a fraction, as if he were listening for a frequency only he could hear.
Leo's skin prickled. "Down!" he shouted, grabbing Logan's arm and blinking—
—just as twin lances of crimson energy burned through the corridor where they'd stood. The beams ripped the wall apart, bored a tunnel of molten slag all the way through the next chamber.
Logan dove behind a pillar. Leo reappeared beside him in a shimmer of air.
"What are you doing back here?" Logan snapped.
"Keeping you from getting your head cut off," Leo said lightly.
Logan opened his mouth to retort Leo's eyes flashed. He seized Logan's shoulder and blinked them again.
Another blast carved through the stone column, vaporizing the space they'd just occupied.
Leaving now wasn't an option. The kids were still escaping. If Leo abandoned the hallway, Deadpool would march after them like a turret on legs.
Beams raked the passage one, two, three painting the air with heat shimmer. Leo and Logan moved between eruptions, one step ahead of annihilation.
A glint on the floor snagged Leo's eye: spilled rounds from a dropped magazine. An idea sparked.
He blinked, snatched a handful of loose bullets, and weighed one in his palm. Deadpool stood twenty meters away, head up, eyes beginning to glow again.
Leo smiled.
He drew his arm back and hurled the round with everything his augmented body could give it. Mid-arc, the bullet vanished.
It reappeared half a meter from Deadpool's forehead, no travel time, no warning, and slammed into bone with the force of a point-blank shot.
Deadpool's head snapped back. A neat dark hole opened above the brow.
Logan blinked. Even before Stryker's upgrades, Wade had batted away machine-gun fire with twin swords.
Now, with tubes and grafts and God knew what else in him, he'd just been… shot.
"What the hell was that?" Logan demanded.
"Telefragging the projectile," Leo said. "Throw, then teleport it the last fifty centimeters. No time to react, no distance to bleed off, all of my arm behind it."
They watched. The hole in Deadpool's skull closed, The slug wriggled out, spat from healing tissue, and clattered to the floor.
"Figures," Leo said, jaw tightening.
He snapped his wrist and sent a second bullet. Deadpool was ready this time. The adamantium blades unfolded into a tight whirling wall, steel singing.
The ricochets rang like a bell, One round pinged off a blade and thudded into Logan's shoulder; the wound sealed almost instantly, knitting around the flattened lead.
Deadpool's eyes narrowed. Another optic blast screamed down the corridor.
—
Elsewhere in the compound, the freed children flooded through a doorway only to be greeted by a hail of gunfire from a mezzanine above.
Emma reacted on reflex, diamond form blooming over her skin. Bullets sparked and shattered harmlessly off the gemstone lattice as she spread herself to cover as many kids as she could.
"Let me handle them. You aim me," a teen with a black metal visor said, stepping to her side his voice shook, but there was iron in it.
Emma bobbed a quick nod, shielding him as they dashed into the open. She pointed up to the catwalk. "There—now, Scott!"
Scott Summers sucked a breath and ripped the visor up.
Scarlet fury burst from his eyes far hotter and heavier than the surgical blasts Deadpool had been firing. The beam swept the mezzanine in a clean arc.
Metal shrieked and buckled. The soldiers went down like wheat in a harvester's path.
"Go!" Emma shouted. She turned and her breath hitched. Kayla knelt just inside the doorway, face drawn.
"Kayla move!" Emma urged.
Kayla shook her head, a fragile smile cracking her lips. "No. You take them and run. Get them out."
"Don't—" Emma took a step and froze. Determination burned in her sister's gaze; it said no arguments.
Emma swallowed hard, nodded once, and spun, leading the group into the corridor.
Kayla watched them vanish. Only then did she lift her hand from her waist. Blood soaked through her shirt, blooming around a neat bullet hole. She exhaled, jaw tight, and forced herself upright.
At the next junction, Emma slowed, uncertainty flaring. "Which way?"
"This way," Scott said instantly, pointing right and charging before she could ask how he knew.
But Emma understood. He couldn't see a thing with that visor down. He was following a voice a calm, wise voice threading through his mind, steady as bedrock.
She didn't know who it belonged to, but she trusted it because he did.
They burst out into the cool night. The forest loomed beyond the fence, black and protective.
A man in a wheelchair waited in the gap, moonlight catching the kind lines of his face and the keen intelligence in his eyes.
Emma halted, still glittering with facets. "You are…?"
"I'm Professor Charles Xavier," he said gently. The warmth in his smile bled tension from the air. The children, still shaking, began to draw steady breaths.
Before Emma could reply, another voice rolled down from above confident, imperious. "And I am Magneto."
Xavier tilted his head up toward the figure hovering in the air and nodded, almost amused. "Hello."
—
Back in the corridor, heat pressed against Leo's skin in waves. He blinked Logan out of one blast, then another, then a third that carved a channel into the floor so hot the concrete glowed.
"We're not going to win a beam-trading contest," Leo said, thinking fast.
"So we don't," Logan grunted. He flexed his hands. Blood from the earlier wound had already dried. "We get close."
"Then we split him." Leo met his eye. "You draw fire. I take the flank. We keep him off the kids until the last of them are clear."
Logan nodded once. "Do it."
He broke cover and ran straight at the living weapon. Deadpool's head snapped to track him; his eyes brightened and Leo was there, behind Deadpool, hand flashing for the exposed tendons at the back of the knee. The cut landed deep. Deadpool staggered a step—
—then stabilized, swinging one katana in a tight backhand that would have removed Leo's head if he hadn't blinked out of existence between blade and neck.
Logan hit hard, slamming his shoulder into Deadpool's sternum, driving him into a wall. The concrete spider-webbed. Deadpool's arm pistoned once; the punch hurled Logan down the hall like a rag doll.
"Cute," Leo said, reappearing on a catwalk above. He pitched two more rounds; Deadpool fanned them into dust and glanced up.
Optic fire lanced toward the platform. Leo blinked, The beam vaporized the railing and bit a glowing trench across empty air.
"Come on," Leo murmured. "Chase me."
The beam swung after him. He blinked again, five meters left, then again, ten meters up, and again, baiting the weapon's gaze away from the fleeing children and toward empty steel and shadow. His lungs began to burn with the rhythm of teleport-combat. Each jump demanded precision. Each jump shaved off his strength.
Logan surged back in, carving a lattice of cuts across Deadpool's torso. The wounds closed as he made them.
Deadpool's blades flashed and sank into Logan's shoulder; Logan hissed, headbutted him, and kept going.
A final cluster of small figures slipped past the far doorway Emma at their flank, Scott at their front. Leo exhaled, Almost there.
Deadpool's eyes flared brighter. He drew a breath if that's what it was and the air prickled. Leo recognized the tell a half-second before it happened.
"Down!" he shouted, and blinked out of the line of a beam that split into two, then four, refracting through mirrored shards he hadn't seen forming on the wall, ricocheting into a lethal grid. The corridor became a cage of red light.
When the air cleared, Deadpool stood at the center of blackened stone, unscorched.
"Okay," Leo said to nobody, tasting copper. "That's new."
Logan wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand and grinned a humorless grin. "Old friends got party tricks."
"Then we bring friends of our own," Leo said.
From outside, two presences pressed at the edge of his awareness like weather fronts colliding one cool and helming, the other magnetic and merciless. Whatever came next, they wouldn't be facing it alone.
"Last kids are out," Leo said, blinking to Logan's side again. "Time to finish this."
Deadpool lifted his head. For the first time since he'd walked through the door, something like recognition flickered there not of faces, but of vectors and trajectories. His body coiled.
Logan rolled his shoulders. "One more round, Wade."
He charged, claws up, unafraid.
Leo vanished from his right, reappeared on his left, and the two of them met the weapon that had once been a man faster, sharper, together.
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