"What's happening? I can't move!"
Wolverine had sprinted toward the wreckage, successfully finishing off Donald Pierce. But just as he unsheathed his claws to deliver a fatal blow to Dr. Rice, his body locked up. It felt as though every molecule of Adamantium in his skeleton had become a lead weight, pinning him to the earth with invisible, crushing force.
A shadow fell over him. An elderly figure descended slowly from the sky, hovering with practiced grace before touching down on the dusty road.
"My apologies, Wolverine. You cannot kill him yet. He is still of great use to us."
"Magneto!" Logan gasped, his teeth gritted against the strain.
"That's impossible!" Professor X cried out from the car, his voice trembling with shock.
Both men had witnessed Erik Lehnsherr's supposed death thirty-five years ago during the chaos at the school. To see him now—his face a mask of cold, mechanical indifference—was like seeing a ghost from a nightmare.
"Magneto? No. Magneto died a long time ago," the figure replied. His voice was hollow, lacking the fiery passion of the old Master of Magnetism. "As for who I am, you don't need to know. Cease your resistance now, and you might suffer less."
Far away in a hidden base in Sokovia, Baron Strucker sat in a high-tech command chair, his fingers dancing across a holographic interface. He was remotely piloting the cyborg. He had arrived toward the end of the pursuit, choosing to wait and see if Dr. Rice's X-24 could handle the situation.
But the "wild mutant boy" had shattered his expectations. Goku hadn't just defeated the Reavers; he had systematically dismantled a Level 3 combatant and a peak-performance clone. Strucker's greed intensified. He didn't just want the boy; he wanted to dissect him to see what made such power possible.
Did he fear the boy? Not for a second. This was a Level 4 mutant body, augmented by thirty-five years of Hydra's black-budget cybernetics.
Magneto was a force of nature. In his prime, he had toyed with nuclear submarines and moved the Golden Gate Bridge as if it were a toy.
Against a child who relied on "brute force," Strucker believed the Master of Magnetism was invincible. Even that energy beam wouldn't matter if the boy couldn't aim through a shifting wall of polarized metal.
With a flick of his finger, Strucker sent a magnetic pulse through Logan's frame. The Wolverine flew backward like a cannonball, crashing into the dirt a hundred feet away.
"Son! Take the others and run!" Logan roared, coughing up blood as he scrambled to his feet. He knew the horror of Magneto better than anyone. "Get out of here!"
Logan lunged forward again, desperate to buy them even a few seconds. But the cyborg merely waved a hand. Twisted rebar from the destroyed trucks whistled through the air, piercing Logan's limbs and pinning him to the ground like a butterfly in a display case.
"You jerk! Let him go!"
Goku's patience snapped. A fierce, golden pressure began to radiate from his small frame. In a flash of movement, he vanished, reappearing inches from the cyborg's face with a fist cocked back.
"So fast!" Strucker hissed in Sokovia.
Goku's speed had doubled since his fight with X-24. He was no longer testing his opponent; he was fighting to protect his friends.
Strucker slammed the "Auto-Combat" override. The cyborg's internal processors, fueled by semi-intelligent AI chips, reacted instantly. A massive slab of scrap metal tore itself from the ground, forming a thick shield between Goku and the old man, reinforced by a localized magnetic field.
*BOOM!*
Goku's fist pulverized the metal shield into shrapnel. But by the time the dust cleared, the cyborg had used the recoil to slide backward, simultaneously manifesting dozens of razor-sharp steel blades from the wreckage and launching them at Goku.
"Afterimage Technique!"
The blades tore through Goku's silhouette, but it was nothing but fading light. The real Goku had leaped high into the air, descending with a heavy kick aimed at the cyborg's head.
Strucker, alerted by the cyborg's 360-degree magnetic sensors, reacted in a heartbeat. He triggered the floor-sand extraction.
*CLANG!*
A shield of iron sand, ripped from the very soil beneath them, rose to meet Goku's heel. The impact sent a shockwave through the ground, but the cyborg used the moment to fire his thrusters, attempting to gain altitude. Strucker knew that if he stayed on the ground, the boy's sheer physical output might eventually crack the shields. In the air, he held the ultimate tactical advantage.
"Multiple Afterimage Technique!"
Suddenly, seven or eight identical versions of Goku circled the hovering cyborg, surrounding him in a ring of determined faces.
"What?!" Strucker stared at the sensors. His data mentioned illusions, but the sheer complexity of eight moving targets was staggering.
"Kill them all!" Strucker commanded.
The cyborg unleashed a massive magnetic burst. Every piece of metal within a fifty-meter radius—screws, plates, engine blocks—began to orbit him at supersonic speeds, creating a localized metallic hurricane that shredded the afterimages instantly.
But as the "Gokus" vanished, a brilliant light flared from directly beneath the cyborg's feet.
"Dummy! I'm down here!"
Goku was crouched on the road, his hands cupped at his side, the blue energy of the Kamehameha already reaching a blinding crescendo. He thrust his palms upward, releasing a massive pillar of light that roared toward the airborne Magneto.