Locke escorted everyone back to the base first. Once the students were settled and the immediate panic had cooled into exhausted silence, he slipped away without fanfare, dressed in black and carrying a small selection of equipment.
Before long, he arrived at Restricted Area 14, the secret prison holding Magneto. It sat on a small island off the New York coast, isolated and tightly controlled, exactly the kind of place built to make people feel like escape and rescue were both impossible.
With Locke's strength, forcing his way in would have been easy enough. But things were different now. After the stunt he'd pulled over New York, he was already a public hero, and some of the abilities he had shown off too openly were best kept out of sight for a while.
Luckily, Anton and his son had been productive.
While developing bombs and armor, they had also turned out a lot of useful toys for him. The black clothing and matching mask Locke wore now were part of an optical camouflage suit, something like a high-end chameleon skin. It wasn't true invisibility, but unless someone stared directly at him and knew what to look for, it was more than enough to deceive the eye.
After infiltrating the base, Locke didn't head straight for Magneto's sector. That area would obviously be the most heavily defended, and there was no reason to rush headfirst into the hardest part of the operation when the smarter approach was to unbalance the whole prison first.
So he used infrared sensing to trace the power lines instead.
Soon, he located the main transmission system. Standing in the dark, he reached out and grabbed the wiring with one hand, then drew a slow breath as the power inside his own body surged outward.
The result was immediate.
Electric current slammed back through the system like a violent reverse flood, overloading the network and causing a powerful short-circuit fault. Underground, the independent generator erupted in sparks, and the surrounding lines followed right behind it.
Smoke and flame burst through the power room almost instantly.
The whole prison was thrown into darkness. Only a handful of dim green emergency lights remained, bathing the corridors in a sickly glow that made the place feel even more unnatural than before.
For a few moments, the base fell into real confusion.
Guards rushed out to investigate, boots pounding through the halls as orders were barked back and forth over comms. But after a quick inspection, they concluded that the issue seemed limited to the power room. Logistics staff moved in to suppress the fire and replace damaged lines, and someone estimated that the backup generator should be online again within minutes.
A false alarm, or so they thought.
The guards relaxed and returned to their stations.
By then, Locke had already finished what he needed to do.
Taking advantage of the dim lighting, he slipped deeper into the prison. Between the optical camouflage and the Breath Concealment Technique, he was little more than a moving shadow. As long as he stayed close to the wall and kept his timing clean, guards walked right past him without the slightest hint that someone was standing inches away.
The core section of the prison lay underground in a spherical chamber built entirely from plastic. Every surface had been designed with one specific prisoner in mind, and the whole place was as non-metallic as human engineering could make it.
There was only one elevator leading directly into it.
Locke crouched beside the elevator door and pressed a slab of plastic explosive into place. Then he stepped back, checked his watch, and silently counted down.
Three.
Two.
One.
Boom.
At the exact same moment, several more explosions ripped through the base.
The monitoring room went up. The supervisor's office went up. The cafeteria was blasted apart. Even the bathroom got hit. It was so absurdly widespread that any illusion of a simple equipment malfunction vanished at once.
Now there was real chaos.
Locke didn't waste time admiring it. The elevator shaft stretched open before him, and he jumped straight down into the darkness.
At the bottom stood a thick non-metallic door. He handled it the same way as the first.
When the door blew open, several plastic rounds tore through the smoke and dust almost immediately, fired blind by the guards inside. Their reaction speed was decent, but their accuracy was awful. Every shot missed him cleanly.
Locke lifted a hand and fired several palm-cannon bursts in return.
The guards dropped almost at once.
That weapon was another Anton-and-son creation, though "creation" was giving them a little too much credit. "High-end imitation" was probably the more honest description.
Elsewhere inside the plastic prison cell, Magneto was drowning in despair.
He had already pieced together most of Stryker's plan, and that knowledge only made things worse. He understood what was coming, understood the scale of the threat facing mutantkind, and yet there was nothing he could do from inside a plastic cage.
Was this the day mutants died out?
What made the situation even more unbearable was the fact that he couldn't fully absolve himself of responsibility. Charles had been captured because of this chain of events. Whatever X-Men were still free wouldn't be enough. In Magneto's opinion, they were nowhere near capable of stopping Stryker.
For the first time in a long while, he felt truly helpless.
Then the vibrations started.
The walls trembled. A muffled blast rolled through the structure, followed by another. Magneto jerked upright, and hope surged through him so suddenly it almost made him dizzy.
Someone had come.
Someone had come to get him out.
To a drowning man, even a twig felt like salvation. To Magneto in that moment, the distant violence outside his cell was the sound of life returning.
Excellent.
Hurry.
Mutants are on the edge of extinction. I need to get out now.
A moment later, he saw a figure at the entrance to the cell block—a young man standing there, smiling at him.
Magneto's eyes lit up.
"A mutant brother?" he called out immediately. "Good, get me out of here now!"
Then the young man floated into the air and drifted toward the cell.
Magneto's surprise deepened into approval.
He can fly.
Good. Very good. A promising young mutant hero.
"Hurry," Magneto said, voice urgent. "We need to go. I know Stryker's real plan, and we have to stop him."
Locke stopped in front of the cell door and looked at him with a calm smile.
"Eric," he said, "I'm here to kill you."
Magneto froze.
"Kill me?" he said, staring at him. "Why?"
"Because you colluded with Stryker," Locke replied gravely. "You betrayed the professor, betrayed Xavier Institute, and put mutantkind in danger. All your mutant brothers want you dead."
"No," Magneto snapped, chest heaving. "I did not!"
His voice rose immediately, full of anger and disbelief.
"How could I betray mutants? How could I betray myself?"
"Facts speak for themselves," Locke said.
"Bullshit!" Magneto barked. "That bastard Stryker has a way to control mutants. I was forced!"
Locke gave a soft laugh. "I don't believe you."
The sheer lightness of those words nearly made Magneto choke on rage.
Grinding his teeth, he turned around and exposed the wound at the back of his neck. "This," he said through clenched fury, "is proof. This is how he controlled me. I'm not lying."
Locke looked it over, then smiled coldly.
"He wanted to control you, and you just let him?" he said. "Do you love yourself that little? You didn't even know how to resist?"
For a second, Magneto thought he might actually cough blood.
Was this human language?
Had this lunatic not seen the kind of restraint hardware Stryker's men were using? Big, thick, reinforced shock prods, containment rigs, enough force to pin down almost anyone. He'd been beaten black and blue, and now this bastard was acting like he'd politely volunteered.
Locke went on mercilessly.
"Eric, this is the judgment of your fellow mutants. You betrayed your own people."
"I betrayed your ass, you bastard!" Magneto roared, slamming himself against the plastic barrier. "Do you know mutants may be wiped out tonight? And you're here slandering me?"
Locke gave a faint snort. "Now you're getting anxious."
Then, unhurriedly, he pulled out a small iron box. He found the air vent on the cell door, fitted the box over it, and removed the cover.
Magneto's expression changed instantly.
He stepped back two paces, eyes narrowed with suspicion. "What are you doing?"
Thunk. Thunk.
Locke tapped the bottom of the box a few times, but nothing happened.
Then several tiny arcs of electricity danced between his fingers and jumped into the metal container.
At once, the inside of the box came alive with an angry buzzing sound. Dozens of thick-bodied yellow bees shot out through the vent and poured into the cell in a furious swarm.
Magneto's face changed completely.
"What is this?" he shouted, backing away in horror.
Locke shrugged. "Insecta. Pterygota. Hymenoptera. Apidae. Killer bee."
The bees had just been electrocuted and were already in a murderous temper. It didn't take them long to discover the only living target inside the cell.
They attacked immediately.
"No—stay back! Get away from me!"
Locke clicked his tongue and actually closed his eyes for a moment, as though the sight before him was simply too tragic to watch directly.
He waited until more than half the swarm had worn themselves out stinging Magneto nearly to death. Then, satisfied, he turned around and left without another word.
Back at the elevator exit, an elite squad had already formed up with ballistic shields and rifles, waiting for the intruder below to come back up.
What they never expected was that the first thing flying out of the shaft would be several pieces of shaped explosive.
Boom. Boom.
The entire team was torn apart in the blast. Blood sprayed across the corridor and broken bodies collapsed in a heap.
Only after that did Locke rise into view, floating up leisurely through the smoke before leaving the base as smoothly as he had entered it.
On the way back to the Avengers base, a system prompt appeared in his mind.
[Mission completed.]
[Target level: Diamond.]
[Upgrade status: Not upgraded.]
[Cause of death: Toxic bee sting.]
[Freshness rating: Five stars.]
[Final emotional state: Anger, anxiety.]
[Emotional rating: Five stars.]
[Comprehensive mission evaluation: Five stars.]
[Special five-star review reward triggered. Gift package upgrading...]
[Reward: Diamond five-star gift package. Luck doubled.]
Magneto really was worthy of his reputation as one of Marvel's greatest scene-stealers. Even locked up as a prisoner, he still rated on the same level as the director of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Come on, Jade Emperor, Buddha, Guanyin, Ten Kings of Hell—everybody get to work.
Open the gift pack.
....
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