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Erik could see everyone standing on Dante's side had their reasons. The Russian and his sister owed a debt, Logan's feral daughter and the rest were loyal to him. Even Ororo's reasoning could be followed. She wanted to protect the city from meaningless destruction.
But he couldn't make any sense of Jean Grey's stance.
Xavier's most gifted student, the one he had invested the most of himself into, stood at this young man's side. But when he thought about the X-Men's circumstances, Xavier's own student turning on him was quite understandable actually. It was only natural for the young to grow disillusioned with Xavier's passive idealism. Erik had hated it for years and still did.
Seeing Jean here felt like a dark confirmation to everything Charles stood for.
'Did Xavier manipulate me?'
The idea that Charles would do that was not entirely outside the realm of possibility if he was completely honest with himself. Grief guided people to make choices that they would regret later, but they made those choices anyway.
Magneto swept his hand through the air. The cars in the block groaned and lifted, their metal twisting under his command. At the same time, he reinforced the metallic fibers of his uniform with magnetic fields, making his clothing almost as durable and heavy as adamantium.
"No matter… the fact that you killed his student would not change. I shall punish you for it."
Dante beckoned with his hand as if he was calling a servant. "Come at me then, old man. I'm going to teach you not to underestimate the young."
"This arrogance…" Erik revealed a cold smile. "Young people are always this way until someone kicks them down a notch."
He spoke from his own experience. The man he was before the death of his family in the great tragedy and the man he became afterward were worlds apart. This whelp would learn the same lesson tonight.
The blonde mutant wielded her sword, ready to help Dante, but the woman in a symbiote suit held her back. The woman Erik knew as Silver Sable from media interviews.
"He wants this fight. Let him have it."
Her sword lowered. Every person in the group went still and looked up with a glimmer of respect in their eyes. This level of respect wasn't given for free—it had to be earned through blood and conflict where he had chosen to stand with them. Erik had seen too much to not understand this fact.
'If the boy had ordered the others to interfere, I would've lost every shred of regard I still held for him.'
Fortunately, he hadn't.
Ororo seemed like she had enough of this. "You stubborn men will fight and the city will pay for it."
"No one will die tonight."
Dante made a bold declaration that had Magneto shaking his head. The man, with his skull for a head, clenched his fist. In the next second, he disappeared. Erik calmly closed his eyes and sensed Dante's location through his magnetic field. The constant field he maintained around himself at all times gave him a full map of everything happening through the movements of metal. It worked on humans since everyone had a few grams of metal in their body.
BOOM! Dante's punch crashed into the always-present magnetic field around him. Magneto felt the impact ring through him.
'Stronger than Scott's maximum concussive blast. Impressive.'
With a single thought, Magneto compressed the vehicles into dense metal blocks and hurled them at Dante. He kept his senses fully connected with his magnetic field in case Dante made any sudden movement.
The young man stood completely still and punched everything thrown at him, destroying tons of compressed steel with his fists.
"Magnetic fields?"
"Correct guess, young man. Even nuclear warheads can't breach through this."
"Aren't you worried about SHIELD? They're pretty racist against mutants."
"SHIELD?" Erik let out a contemptuous laugh. "I have never feared them, and I never will. Their mutant-hunting machines are trinkets before the Master of Magnetism."
Regardless of how much SHIELD's mutant weapons adapted and evolved, they could never fully resist his powers. He had been holding back for the sake of mutantkind, which seemed to have been mistaken for fear.
"Tonight, I must teach you to fear Magneto."
Dante tilted his head. "You should stop before you tweak your back."
"Silence, whelp!"
Magneto reached out with his mind. Every manhole cover in a four-block radius was freed at once, spinning like razor-edged discs. They launched at Dante from every angle and timed in a way dodging one would put in the path of the next.
He grabbed one cover and used them to intercept the rest like it was nothing. The entire sequence was a picture-perfect demonstration of power and technique.
'Is he really a youngster?'
The way Dante moved gave the impression of an old veteran with decades of experience.
'We have to make use of him to break the deadlock against Fury.'
Non-mutant this powerful could break their mutant-hunting machines once and for all. Convincing him to help might be harder than convincing Xavier to give up on his idealist dream of integration, but Erik was nothing if not persistent.
Dante vanished and closed the distance in an instant. A single straight punch hit the magnetic barrier like a thunderclap and sent Erik skidding backward through the air over a hundred meters.
"You are strong, I'll give you—"
Dante was before him again, delivering the same punch. Buildings shook on both sides of the street as if an earthquake had hit them.
Magneto reinforced the field and reached for the cars on the streets, their alarms shrieking in every direction as they moved.
Dante was unrelenting in his approach and continued hammering the barrier. Magneto ignored him completely and compressed the cars then he reached down into the bones of the city, the infrastructure of the city, where centuries of ironwork, cable, pipe, and girder were buried.
Entire sections of road buckled and ripped before launching in the air.
The skeleton of an old elevated rail line in the distance screeched as it was ripped from its framework and brought to Magneto.
The tons of metal reassembled in the air into a massive churning storm.
He spread his arms and thrust them towards Dante. The vortex of scrap and steel rushed toward Dante, and the entire block disappeared in a roar of impact and dust—until two thick red beams tore through it. As hot as the sun itself, the concentrated beam completely obliterated the metal storm in seconds.
Magneto hovered there, stunned, still seeing the afterimages of red beams in his eyes. Dante floated on the side with his arms crossed. Those beams had come from his eyes. Unlike Scott's concussive blasts made from pure force, the beams emitted from Dante's eyes were completely formed from heat.
"You… you are not a human."
He pointed at his face. "Do I look like one?"
Magneto couldn't speak as a destructive wave rippled through his magnetic field. Punches rained from every side, making him flinch. He barely caught a glimpse of Dante between the blows and was unable to keep up with the young man's extraordinary speed.
He couldn't allow this to continue, or Dante would absolutely tear down his magnetic field.
In a moment of desperation, Erik moved away from his comfort zone of controlling metal. He never had to do this for anyone until now.
"I never imagined I would need to call upon my full power against a mere child," he growled. "Take pride in forcing my hand… while you still can."
With a surge of will, he first nullified gravity across a hundred-meter radius. Dante's arms flailed helplessly as he began to drift in the air. His confusion was palpable even with that skull face.
The electromagnetic spectrum included visible light, radio waves, ultraviolet light, gamma rays, and x-rays. He could control each one of them, though not as refined as his control over metal. He never had to rely on them until today.
Erik unleashed magnetic rays that blasted the young man backward. The concentrated magnetic rays stunned Dante, giving him the time needed to prepare his next move.
He reached into the atmospheric electrical charge. His control over the electromagnetic spectrum always gave him access to it, allowing him to forge gigantic bolts, each made purely from the concentrated energy of a storm. Even Ororo was awed by the sheer scale of electricity under Erik's control.
"Child, taste the purest form of storm."
The bolts thundered in the sky and struck Dante, who was still trapped in the zero-gravity field. Blinding light and thunder surrounded the entire block. The shockwave of the impact rolled through, shattering windows for blocks around.
Erik's expression darkened as the dust began to settle. "How are you still standing? What in God's name are you made of?"
Dante floated before him once more. Not only had he survived the lightning storm, he had managed to erase the zero-gravity field.
"Flesh and bones, just like you," he said, shaking his head. "You're giving free ammunition to triple J. He'll farm weeks of content from this. The infinite content glitch they talked about in the Bible."
"We will find the limits of how much your flesh and bones can endure."
Dante shivered dramatically. "Spooky."
Focusing his electromagnetic control, he found construction sites spread throughout New York and yanked. Every crane in thousands of kilometers rushed at him as fast as lightning. At a wave of his hand, the ginormous machines folded and formed two gigantic orange swords.
He swung his hand and the sword followed the movement, striking down at Dante. The other sword came sweeping horizontally, closing in on Dante in a pincer movement designed to crush the young man where he stood.
Dante simply reached out with both hands and caught the edges of the enormous swords as if they weighed nothing. The shockwave obliterated the building behind him, yet the boy didn't even flinch.
"Size doesn't always matter."
Dante vanished again. Magneto didn't even blink this time. He had gotten accustomed to the boy's superhuman speed and his blows tickling the magnetic field.
Erik only spared one moment to reinforce the shimmering barrier—
CRACK. CRACK.
Hundreds of tiny fractures spread across the magnetic barrier that were only visible to him. His eyes grew wide behind the helmet. "What?!"
Even though he was shocked, his decades of experience already propelled him into the next move. He put his hands up and poured all of his focus into repairing the magnetic field. But it was already too late. Dante's hands had already passed through the fields and wrapped around his throat.
"Did you think I couldn't get through?" Dante asked in a mocking voice as cold flames flickered in his empty eye-sockets. He lifted Erik, who was in armor weighing tons, with terrifying ease. "Bitch, I was testing how much strength I need to break the field. It was twenty percent."
"You…"
Dante tilted his head. "I didn't want to accidentally turn you into a meat patty. Ugh yuck, why did I phrase it like that?"
Erik's face turned red, which wasn't entirely because of his troubled breathing. In every conflict across every decade of his life, he had been the one holding back. But today, a youngster had to do it against him.
AGAINST HIM? THE MOST POWERFUL MUTANT IN THIS WORLD?
Never in his life had Magneto been so thoroughly humiliated.
"Release me," Erik snarled through gritted teeth and reached for the swords. They moved simultaneously, one striking from above and one from below in a deadly cross.
Dante stepped sideways without glancing at the attack. He looked up at someone or something. "Death, you can repair everything now."
"Who…" Erik managed to choke out, still dangling helplessly in the young man's grip. "...Are you speaking to?
"Your mom. Watch how she rewinds time for me."
The massive swords were yanked free from his control and expanded, rearranging into dozens of cranes. They flew back to where they had come from. The shattered debris and boulders lifted from the ruined streets and formed back into buildings. The roads were repaired. Even the cars came back. It was like watching a video being rewound.
Erik had faced extraordinary things, he had done extraordinary things, but the unfathomable display of power sent a chill racing down his spine.
"What… are you?"
"Someone you should've left alone."
Erik begrudgingly agreed. He came to bully a young man, but he was taught a lesson instead.
Dante loosened his grip on his throat, allowing Erik a moment to breathe, but Dante's next words suffocated him.
"Let's go meet that coward professor," he whispered with a flat expression, but Erik could imagine a cruel smirk underneath the mask. "If he can't satisfy me, I'm going to bury both of you in the same grave."
***
Ororo's POV
All of Ororo's anger had dissipated, replaced by a feeling close to reverence—a feeling close to what people felt for her when they worshipped her as a goddess.
"Unfathomable…"
They called her a goddess for bringing down rain. What should Dante be called for this?
Jean shook her head with a troubled smile. "He loves showing off."
Xavier's prized pupil, the one he had shaped with care and love, now spoke of his "enemy" as if he were some charming rogue, not a god-like being who had just dismantled the Master of Magnetism like a child breaking a toy.
"Jean… do you know why this is happening?"
Jean shook her head. "If I have to guess, it's… Death is intervening. He called her name before he left."
"Death?"
"A cosmic goddess who is in love with him…" Jean said with an exaggerated sigh. "That's what Silvija told me. I don't know anything more than that, but seeing this…"
"We have to believe."
Jean nodded. "We have no choice."
Ororo saw people get out of their houses and act in pure disbelief about everything. The city had become completely empty during their battle, hence not a single person was killed. Dante had lived up to his promise, which was the sole reason she had not intervened in their battle.
Her gaze shifted to the group of Dante's allies. None of them looked surprised by the miraculous display, except for the blonde girl clutching her glowing sword.
The Russian woman stared up with open astonishment on her face. "Looks like Darkchylde didn't lose to some background character."
"Miss Ororo, leave the X-Men." Jean extended a hand. "Let's protect this world together."
Ororo's eyes locked onto Jean's hand. One small movement and she would be able to utilize her powers with freedom. She would be able to fight for her own existence and not be suppressed by SHIELD.
Just one movement.
She closed her eyes, pushing down the temptation. "I can't…"
Jean flew closer and hugged Ororo. "You don't have to make that face. It's your decision. I'm happy as long as you are."
"I really want to, Jean," Ororo whispered. "But I have to help Charles. He helped me when I had nothing. Without him, I'd have been taken away by Fury."
Jean pulled back slightly and revealed a soft expression. "He has, but SHIELD… they changed him. He is no longer the same man who helped us."
Ororo could not refute it. Today's events had laid it bare for all of them, revealing clearly how Charles had become… twisted. The pressure SHIELD put on Charles was immense.
"That being said," Jean said, still holding her. "Dante and I are always here if you change your mind."
Ororo nodded with a gentle smile. "Likewise, I'm here if either of you need help." Her smile became a bit mischievous. "As long as he protects me from SHIELD's weapons."
Jean chuckled. "After what we saw today… I believe SHIELD can't do shit to him."
"I have to agree with you."
A/N: Guess who'll die next chapter :)
***
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