Lucius took a step back and inspected the woman he was holding with telekinesis and mınd controlling through telepathy.
Lucius took one step back, folded his arms, and inspected the woman hanging in front of him under telekinetic restraint.
She had tattoos crawling over both arms, one across the throat, another vanishing under the collar of her jacket. She was one of the regional heads of a cartel network, violent, useful, and morally disposable even by generous standards. More importantly, she was the sixty-seventh believer whose prayers Lucius had very generously answered.
He tilted his head.
"Now change your arse size."
The order came out with the calm authority of a man adjusting a mannequin in a shop window.
The woman obeyed at once. Muscle, fat distribution, connective tissue, and skin tension all shifted under the new template with smooth, visible compliance. No rupture. No rejection. No involuntary collapse of the surrounding structure. The adjustment held.
Lucius smiled.
There it was.
He had run the same template through humans and mutants already. Different body types. Different ages. Different baseline conditions. The results had stabilised every time. Mystique's mutation really was exquisite. Not an illusion, not surface glamour, but full control over outward morphology through a body that could rewrite its own visible structure at will. Skin tone, facial geometry, musculature, height distribution, voice support, even the small surface details that convinced the eye a person had always looked that way. It was vulgar in the best possible sense. Flexible, useful, and amazingly convenient.
He had tested the outcome on many slightly voluntary people, verifying what it would and would not do before making the necessary change to himself. It could not conjure mass from nowhere without consequences, but it could redistribute and reshape a body with enough fluid precision to make ordinary vanity look like a peasant hobby.
The woman stared through the telepathic compulsion with the dull, obedient eyes of somebody whose will had been beaten and politely evicted.
Lucius gave an approving nod.
"Good girl. See? We are advancing science together."
Then he knocked her unconscious with a neat psychic twist and lowered her onto the ground beside the others.
They lay in rows now, the prayers he answered, his tributes, his collection of cartel members and criminal waste. He had no emotional objection to turning them into currency. Quite the opposite. The world had overproduced rubbish, and he was getting decent exchange rates for disposal.
The array was already etched into the ground beneath them, carved in rings and linked runes while he floated above the forest ground. There was enough blood in the history of this forest to satisfy the aesthetic without him adding fresh stains himself, which he found considerate.
He drifted towards the first runic mark while humming an old metal chorus under his breath and playing air guitar. Success deserved a little ceremony.
You poor, sweet, innocent thing
Dry your eyes and testify
You know you live to break me
Don't deny, sweet....
The moment his feet touched the rune, he threw both hands wide and shouted.
"Sacrifice."
The array answered at once.
The bodies began to disappear with the ugly neatness of a thug collecting protection money. Flesh thinned into absence. Weight went. Presence went. Sixty-seven lives, none of which the world would mourn properly, vanished into Bob's accounting.
Lucius opened the first page and watched the soul count in the corner climb from zero to sixty-seven.
That made him feel much better.
He kept humming as he turned the newly acquired template on himself.
The change began inside.
He felt the fluidity spread through muscle memory first, then deeper through skin, connective tissues, and blood like a new permission written into the body. Mystique's mutation did not merely allow disguise. It gave him active authority over the visible architecture of his own form. He tested the range quickly, carefully, feeling where adjustment remained easy, where mass shifted cleanly, where structural pressure warned against stupidity.
Then he indulged himself, starting with height, then shoulder breadth, and then muscle density.
Then muscle density, not the swollen nonsense of steroid vanity but the hard, heavy build of someone forged rather than groomed. Bone followed, subtle enough to support the rest. Facial geometry sharpened under the skin. Jawline. Brow. Nose. Cheek structure. Hair darkened. Stubble settled in. The eyes remained pale, but colder now beneath the rest of the shape.
When he was done, Lucius stood six foot ten and somewhere north of two hundred and eighty pounds, built like old heroic statuary with much worse intentions. Heavy muscle sat where it should. The face looked carved rather than raised. It was, in his view, a great improvement.
He flexed one hand, rolled his neck, and enjoyed the simple fact of existing more satisfactorily than before.
"Now that," he said to the empty cellar, "is a body worth charging people to look at."
He teleported away.
-
The mansion opened around him in a hush of expensive space, sea air, and the faint, disciplined quiet of a house not yet used to being lived in by somebody like him.
Lucius appeared in the main bedroom overlooking the dark water beyond the private beach and immediately let his senses spread through the house and grounds and beyond.
He had left enough potions with Sebastien to cover the day's sales. That part was handled. The rest of the evening belonged to him, his new body, and whatever foolishness the world might choose to provide.
The sweep returned something better than quiet: movement, many minds, and the disciplined pressure of trained ones.
Some were held tight in the professional way soldiers tried when they knew fear would become contagious if they let it breathe. Others were stranger. Lady Deathstrike's mind carried violence with the cold discipline of a blade kept clean for the next use. Jason Stryker felt wrong in the softer, filthier way telepaths often did when they had been raised without mercy and then sharpened by it. Leech was small, bored, dimly afraid, and functionally irrelevant to half the powers Stryker clearly thought he understood.
Lucius's pleasant surprise deepened into delight.
"Oh, you sweet, overconfident creatures."
He walked into the dressing room, admired himself in the long mirror for one completely justified moment, and then went downstairs to find Sebastien.
The butler heard him coming and turned with professional readiness already on his face.
That readiness lasted exactly one second.
Then Benjamin Carter, aka Sebastien, saw what had entered the room, opened his mouth, and forgot how to continue being a butler.
Lucius watched the shock bloom with genuine interest.
Sebastien was not a weak man. He had survived luxury hospitality, Lucius Noctis, and the ongoing humiliation of being renamed by force of personality. Yet even he needed two full heartbeats to reconcile the familiar voice with the monstrous improvement now wearing it.
"Sir," he managed at last, though the word sounded as if it had fallen down a flight of stairs first.
Lucius spread his arms a little.
"Well?"
Sebastien blinked hard.
"With respect, sir, you appear to have become a historical painting of a war crime."
Lucius's grin widened.
"That is one of the finest compliments I have ever received."
Sebastien drew a slow breath and attempted to restore order to his own face.
"Am I to understand this might happen again, sir??"
"It would be concerning if it were spontaneous." Lucius looked past him towards the dark windows. "We have guests."
Sebastien's eyebrows rose with hope.
"Police?"
"No, some soldiers, mutants, and a colonel who keeps confusing obsession with planning."
Benjamin closed his eyes briefly.
He had hoped for rescue by ordinary means in this new life of his. Instead, he had apparently been transferred straight into a siege.
"What would you like me to do?"
Lucius considered it and chose generosity.
"Sit somewhere expensive and do not die. I may need you to look impressed later."
Sebastien, to his lasting credit, nodded once and moved exactly as ordered.
Lucius went out onto the terrace and sat down facing the sea with the ease of a man expecting service. Behind him, the house remained dark enough to look sleeping. Around him, the grounds stretched wide, the private beach a pale line beneath the night, the approach roads hidden by walls, trees, and the idiocy of men who thought stealth improved once they wanted something badly enough.
Then he let his awareness spread fully.
The operation unfolded in his mind before it fully unfolded on the ground.
Stryker had built it on the same mistake the man kept making, namely, assuming every dangerous thing Lucius possessed was still governed by mutant suppression. Telekinesis, regeneration and telepathy. His invisibility was not known to anyone. Leech should have mattered if the powers still sat in an X Gene framework.
They did not.
The Array of Convergence had long since moved those gifts into a different category entirely. Leech would dampen other mutant signatures, such as his new body, which he liked very much. Hence, the little freak became his first target once he got bored with the show. The core abilities that mattered here were already his by a different route. Stryker had brought a child as a countermeasure to a problem he did not understand.
That alone made the night worthwhile.
--
Far out beyond the walls, Stryker gave the signal.
The helicopters stayed low and distant for the moment, dark shapes moving into holding positions over the coast and inland routes. Ross's specialised battalion had already been broken into teams and laid out in a patient ring around the estate. Snipers settled into their hides with suppressed rifles and tranquiliser loads calibrated under the arrogant assumption that enough chemistry and metal solved anything eventually. Ground teams moved through the tree line in staggered formation, using the dark and the noise of the sea to cover their last approach.
Stryker remained at the mobile command point with Ross on encrypted comms and the live positions feeding onto his screens.
"This is cleaner than the hotel," Ross said.
Stryker watched the green icons inch inward.
"Yes."
"You're sure about you mutants?"
Stryker looked towards the forward team.
Lady Deathstrike moved first, low and silent, cutting past the outer wall once a grapnel line gave her the angle. Jason followed under escort until he had the proximity he wanted to begin pressing his illusions ahead of him. Leech was kept with the central containment element, handlers close, ready to move him forward when the target was engaged, and the powers needed collapsing.
Stryker's mouth hardened.
"I'm sure enough."
He did not believe in perfect plans, only in overwhelming force and enough layers of failure that one success somewhere still pushed the mission over the line.
Deathstrike would close and cut. Jason would disorient. Leech would suppress the mutant side of the target if brought close enough. Ross's men would lock down movement and exit routes. The helicopters would crush any attempt at escape by air or sea. Stryker had studied Noctis's known powers, modelled his behavioural pattern, and built the assault around pressure, speed, and denial.
It was the best version of many ideas.
He smiled.
Within hours, the freak would be on one of his slabs.
Soon after that, Noctis would become useful in the proper way, stripped of independence and turned into exactly what all-powerful mutants should become under firm hands: productive.
Ross heard the tone before the words and chose not to comment.
"Forward team advance. Containment units hold until contact. Snipers keep windows covered. Nobody fires unless the target moves or Deathstrike calls for it."
Deathstrike reached the rear side of the house. Jason moved into range. Leech's handlers brought him closer in short, careful bursts.
Every man in the outer ring tightened.
Inside the mansion grounds, Lucius sat down more comfortably in the terrace chair and let the whole operation pour through his mind in fragments of discipline, false confidence, and institutional filth.
He read the sacrificial lambs as they came, taking in the battalion sergeant worrying about line of sight, the sniper trying not to think about the brief from New York, the handler resenting Leech and hating the little freak while also finding its effect on other freaks a heavenly justice, Jason's warped eagerness to gain his father's approval, Stryker's anticipation sharp as appetite.
Lucius smiled, wide and pleased and monstrous in a way none of them yet deserved to understand.
Then he murmured to the dark grounds ahead of him, almost tenderly,
"Come to daddy."