The first sign that something was wrong came as a whisper of static—so faint Ethan thought it was a loose intercom wire somewhere in the upper halls.
The second sign was Cyclops freezing mid-sentence, his hand flying to his visor.
The third sign was the metal scream of Cerebro's containment drones tearing through the sky.
They descended like mechanical vultures—sleek silver bodies, glowing blue lenses, restraints hanging beneath them like hunting talons. And behind them rolled half-spherical containment pods, humming with telekinetic dampeners.
Jean swore softly under her breath.
Cyclops barked, "Everyone BACK INSIDE—NOW!"
The grounds exploded into motion. Students ran, teachers shouted, and alarms began screaming in multiple languages at once. The front lawn burst into chaos as drones swooped low, scanning the mutant students with blinding white beams.
"TARGET IDENTIFIED. COLLECT."
Ethan, Peter, Paige, and Amy had barely reached the main steps when a drone descended directly in front of them.
Peter didn't hesitate—he was already webbing a drone, swinging it, causing it to crash into another nearby drone. Cyclops fired a ruby blast that sheared a drone clean in half. Jean threw up a telekinetic wall to shield a cluster of fleeing students.
Xavier's dream home—the safe haven of the X-Mansion—had become a battlefield in three seconds flat.
Paige's eyes went steel-hard, literally, her skin beginning to shift. "We should help!"
Amy's aura flickered gold, as if Nut's power sensed danger. "Peter—should I—?"
Peter landed beside them, panting. "Stay inside. I mean it. These things are dangerous."
"But YOU'RE going out there!" Amy protested.
"That's because I'm stupid!" he yelled, then shot another web and jumped back into the fight.
Paige took a step forward. "We can't just stand here while everyone else—"
Ethan placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.
"Paige," he said softly, with that calm tone that sounded like comfort but wasn't, "you're powerful. So is Amy. If you stay here, you're liabilities. If you go out there, you're assets. Do what you think your future teachers want from you."
Paige blinked—then nodded, convinced.
Amy's aura brightened. "Peter's gonna kill me for this."
"Only if you don't tell him whose idea it was. Tell him I told you to do it, okay?" Ethan said lightly.
They rushed out through the doors, both glowing—one made of flames, the other of cosmic gold.
Perfect.
The moment the two girls crossed into the chaos, Ethan's expression shifted—losing warmth, losing softness.
Focus returned.
Now the students were fleeing inward, down hallways, into safe rooms. Cyclops and Jean were fighting outside. Jean would be too busy to do a mental probe. Security personnel were overwhelmed.
The mansion was a maze, but today—today it was a maze on fire.
Exactly what Ethan needed and what he had been waiting for.
He joined the wave of panicked students rushing inside, letting the tide sweep him through the foyer, past the main staircase, past the staff offices. With everyone distracted, surveillance monitoring would be reduced to emergency triage only.
He peeled off the moment the hallway emptied.
Time to collect the things on my grocery list.
He found the faculty wing—Jean's door marked by a tiny engraved plaque. Storm's door was a few paces down.
The mental signatures on the other side of each were faint—Jean was outside, Storm was somewhere out there in the world looking for Professor X. Perfect.
Ethan slipped inside Jean's room first.
It smelled like lavender and old paper—the scent of a mind trying to soothe itself. Books were stacked neatly. A robe draped over a chair. A hairbrush lying on the dresser.
He lifted it carefully.
A strands—one rich red—clung between the bristles. He looked for a strand that went all the way down to the root.
Jean Grey's DNA.
He tucked it into a ziplock bag he brought and moved to the next door.
Storm's quarters were painfully organized—everything aligned, folded, perfected. Her brush was clean but not immaculate.
He found a single silver curl caught beneath the dresser that also went down to the root.
Another bag. Another sample.
Two mutant power sets were collected for a future experiment.
Now for the main objective.
Ethan moved through the upper halls, ignoring emergency protocols blaring over the intercom.
"All students report to your designated safe areas. All senior staff report to the Situation Room."
He followed the architectural memory he'd built from every X-Men comic he'd read as a child. Down the west wing. Behind the administration block. Through the disguised elevator that required a clearance card, which he bypassed by slipping into the stairwell maintenance shaft beside it.
The moment the doors closed, he was plunged into dim underground light.
Sublevel 1.
Sublevel 2.
Sublevel 3.
Here, the mansion shed all pretensions of being a school.
The walls were reinforced alloy, humming with generators. The floors vibrated faintly from the Danger Room's automated systems.
Ethan kept walking.
He reached the workshop door after three turns and a hidden panel. A retina scanner blinked red. Ethan angled slightly to the side and waited.
Soon, a member of the X-Men hurried past. Ethan managed to catch a quick glimpse of the person, and it turned out to be Rouge.
[Power Absorption / Life-Force Drain (Rouge) – S-Rank]
{Warning: ability will be touch-activated and always active}
[Do you wish to copy this ability?]
Ethan slipped through the closing door without a sound.
The workshop was chaos incarnate—half-built machines suspended midair, holographic blueprints flickering, prototype energy weapons lying half-disassembled. And at the heart of it all—
Forge.
He stood hunched over a circular device the size of a hubcap, welding its interior with sparks dancing off his gloves. His long ponytail was tied back, safety goggles perched on his forehead, eyes narrowed in deep concentration.
He didn't look up. 'Good.'
Ethan reached into himself—activating his system.
[Ability Detected: Superhuman Intuitive Invention (Forge) – F-Rank]
[Do you wish to copy this ability?]
[Yes]
It settled into him as the system interface appeared.
[Abilities:]
S-Rank: [N/A]
A-Rank: [N/A]
B-Rank: [N/A]
C-Rank: [N/A]
D-Rank: [N/A]
E-Rank: [Supercomputer Mind]
F-Rank: [Superhuman Intuitive Invention]
[Superhuman Intuitive Invention (Forge) – F-Rank (Installed)]
[Ability Detected: Punch Dimension Optic Energy Projection (Alpha-Level) (Cyclopes) – A-Rank]
[Ability Detected: Telepathy (Omega-Level) (Jean Gray) – S-Rank]
[Ability Detected: Telekinetic (Omega-Level) (Jean Gray) – S-Rank]
[Ability Detected: Phoenix Host Compatibly (Jean Gray) – S-Rank]
[Power Absorption / Life-Force Drain (Alpha-Level) (Rouge) – S-Rank]
Forge's essence washed over his mind.
For a moment, his brain hummed—like gears aligning. Sage's Supercomputer Mind and Forge's Superhuman Intuitive Invention clicked together like they were always meant to be.
Schematics of the invention he wanted but didn't know how to build unfolded behind his eyes. Microtech lattices, neural interface, nanotech, etc. All the plans he had up till now, he felt he could complete in a few months.
Forge paused.
Turned slightly.
Ethan had already left the second he got what he came for, so Forge only saw an empty doorway.
Forge muttered, "Thought I heard something…"
But he went back to welding.
Mission complete.
Now he just needed to get out.
But first—cleanup.
Ethan doubled back, slipping into a narrow service corridor just off the workshop hub. Pipes ran along the ceiling. A terminal sat recessed into the wall, half-hidden as a part of the wall. Ethan opened and accessed the panel. 'Perfect. Just what I need.'
He knelt, fingers flying across the touchscreen.
Forge's systems were sophisticated—encrypted, adaptive, paranoid by design—but Ethan's new F-Rank intuition mixed with his already formidable hacking skills made the obstacles feel like children's puzzles. The subsystem bloomed open to him, schematic after schematic flickering across the display.
Security feeds.
Hallway motion trackers.
Biometric access logs.
There he was on half a dozen cameras, monitoring hallways he had no right to be in.
He selected the entire block of footage.
Delete.
Then, because Forge was too smart to be fooled by empty space, Ethan rewound the footage to ten minutes earlier, looped it, and changed the timestamp—hallways empty, undisturbed, with no intruders.
Next, he accessed the live camera network.
Rows of little red indicator dots—active surveillance—blinked at him like warning eyes.
He blinked back.
Disable sector: Sublevel C.
Disable sector: Workshop approach hallway.
Disable sector: West faculty wing cameras 3–7.
The dots dimmed to gray.
The system pinged a warning: "Unauthorized override detected."
Ethan overrode the override.
The system went quiet. With that done, he accessed a file in the system database and skimmed through it quickly.
He then stood, smoothing his shirt, and stepped back into the corridor without leaving a shadow behind.
Only then did he head toward the exit.
Alarms blared overhead.
"Warning. Cerebro drones breaching sublevel ventilation shafts."
'Fantastic. I still have time.'
He reached the elevator, ducked into the stairwell again, and quietly emerged into the main hall where dozens of students huddled. He quickly joined the masses.
Paige burst through the doors minutes later—skin still steel-plated, hair wild. "I think that's the last of them."
Amy followed, aura dim but stable. "We were so cool just now."
Peter landed beside them, battered, costume torn, and panting.
"You two are grounded. No more heroing for the rest of the month," he gasped.
Paige grinned. "Worth it."
Amy beamed. "We saved like… seven people! Including you!"
Peter pinched the bridge of his nose. "One day… JUST ONE DAY… where nothing explodes. Is that too much to ask for?"
Ethan approached from the side, expression perfectly concerned. "Yes, it is. Anyways, are you all alright?"
Paige nodded. "Yeah. You?"
"Oh," Ethan said lightly, "I stayed exactly where you told me."
Peter stared at him, suspicious but exhausted. "Let's just get home. Before the mansion decides to gain sentience again."
"Yeah, I've had more than enough excitement to last me a lifetime," said Ethan.
Behind them, a containment drone crashed through a window, sent flying by Cyclops' optical blast.