"Logan, go!" Director Daisy dove through the gap torn in the car's side and cleared the wreckage at a run. Wolverine's survival odds inside a train crushed to a pretzel were essentially 100%. She could account for him later.
She stepped out of the train.
Magneto had been thorough. Outside, there was an ambush waiting too.
Cap was already engaged: tangled with a snarling figure whose fingers sprouted bone-white claws extending to vicious points. Across from them, a team of S.H.I.E.L.D. agents was firing at something wrong—something scuttling up the wall on all fours, dressed in tattered filthy clothes, lashing out with a tongue that stretched to ten meters (33 feet) before snapping back.
"Disgusting." Daisy watched the thing adhere to the wall and nearly brought up her breakfast.
Sabretooth versus Cap. Toad on the walls.
Sabretooth and Wolverine had a century-long grudge with no known expiration date.
Toad looked like easy pickings. He was not. On his best day he had taken Cyclops, Storm, and Jean Grey simultaneously—and somehow won. His record against serious opposition was genuinely absurd.
Senior member of the Brotherhood. Luck of a main character, fate of a recurring background villain.
Shot through the knee by Fantomex. Lived.
Riddled by The Hood. Lived.
M-Day: Scarlet Witch declared no more mutants, and the depowerment wave swept through everything in range. Toad kept his powers. Somehow.
Messiah Complex: a running battle with Sentinels that put dozens of mutants down hard. Toad lost one finger.
He eventually retired in peace and spent the back end of his career mopping floors at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning. That was his ending. A man with a protagonist's luck and absolutely none of a protagonist's significance.
Mockingbird had both her batons out, working fast—it was only her reflexes that had kept Toad from breaking through the S.H.I.E.L.D. line.
"Logan, take Rogue and go. There are plenty of us here." Daisy saw Wolverine emerge from the wreckage and waved him off. She couldn't just leave—not with her agents still engaged—but she could get Rogue out of the equation.
Logan grabbed Rogue without a word and was gone within seconds. Daisy registered that he'd departed with impressive decisiveness, but the fight in front of her required her attention.
Daisy's dynamic visual processing ran at twenty-five times normal human speed. Toad's acrobatics—the moves he was most proud of—looked like slow choreography to her.
She could read every impact point before he committed to it, extrapolate each bullet's trajectory, calculate the full outcome in the time it took anyone else to blink.
She didn't need to show a single ability to close this. Pure marksmanship.
She was tracking his position, adjusting aim, coordinating the shot sequence—and in the available processing headroom, she also checked out Mockingbird's figure, critiqued the grip technique of two agents on her left, and wondered if she'd remembered to turn off the burner on the stove this morning.
The gun spoke.
Toad was mid-vault across the wall, confident in his angles. He caught two rounds—shin and chest. His movement pattern stuttered. S.H.I.E.L.D. agents poured fire into the gap.
Then a pale-red shape moved—faster than the eye could fully track—seized Toad, and vanished. When it reappeared, it was standing fifty meters away, the figure pressing quick, precise strikes against Toad's torso, popping the bullets free.
"What are you?!" Mockingbird stepped in front of Daisy, batons raised.
The figure straightened and looked back at them.
The man wore a black suit that fit wrong against his complexion—because his complexion was wrong, skin burnished to a deep unnatural crimson. A vertical scar crossed his left eye from brow to cheek. Eyes like amber, deep-set. Two long blades held loosely. And trailing behind him, unmistakable: a bright-red forked tail.
Azazel.
He was a minor role in the films. In reality, he was several thousand years old—roughly Apocalypse's tier for sheer accumulated time.
Teleportation. Longevity. Shapeshifting. Mental manipulation through speech—different from White Queen or Professor X's direct telepathy; this was a spoken insidious persuasion that Daisy clocked the instant she registered his presence. A significant portion of what human historical records attributed to Satan turned out to be him—not the actual extradimensional demon, just Azazel. He had been very busy over the centuries.
With Azazel on scene, the calculus shifted. Sabretooth broke off from Cap and fell back to position. Both sides disengaged and regrouped.
Sabretooth's face was a mess from Cap's fists—until it wasn't. Ten seconds of healing factor resolved the damage in real time.
"You call yourself a mutant?" Daisy studied Azazel with the detachment of a naturalist encountering a new specimen. "You look fully demonized."
"Young one." His voice was unhurried. "The Brotherhood of Mutants has the power to tear you apart. You wouldn't want to see that."
He glanced at Cap, filed it somewhere, and let his full attention settle on Daisy. Then—speaking to her through his mental power, his words not audible to those around them—he addressed her directly.
"I've seen your kind before. I know you're not a mutant. Long-lived as I am, I no longer have the energy for the recklessness of the young—only a little accumulated knowledge left to be proud of. I have no interest in why you came to Earth. But I think you'd prefer to keep your presence quiet."
He had her mapped as an Inhuman advance scout from lunar Attilan. It was an impressively creative misread.
Daisy turned the situation over carefully. She didn't trust a single syllable out of Azazel. His teleportation was the real threat. Without a counter to it, the entire engagement became reactive. She'd weighed the option of atomic cutting, but against an opponent who'd survived thousands of years and whose full range of abilities she couldn't assess—if it didn't finish him immediately, things would get very unpleasant very fast.
"I don't believe you."
A pause. Azazel's grip on the blades shifted fractionally.
Then Magneto's voice, composed and certain, arriving like a verdict.
"Doesn't matter whether you believe him or not, Agent Johnson."
Daisy turned.
Magneto walked out through the demolished train, gripping Wolverine like luggage.
"You've already lost."
Impossible. She had watched Logan take Rogue and leave. She had verified it—ran a frequency scan on him. Clean return. Nothing had flagged.
Magneto dropped Logan on the ground with roughly the same care he'd give a piece of trash. His old face was full of smug satisfaction.
"You rely too heavily on your own senses. Your eyes lied to you. Your instincts, the same."
Daisy's teeth pressed together. "Mystique. She was in the train car the whole time?"
The "Wolverine" who had walked out with Rogue—she'd run a frequency check on him the moment they'd separated. Nothing had flagged. And she'd still been completely fooled.
"Don't be angry, young one. Take the lesson. We'll meet again."
Azazel collected the three of them. They dissolved into a thin wisp of smoke and were gone.