"...Fine."
Although he had no idea how Fenris intended to restore hard drive data that had already been ground into dust, Magneto hesitated for a moment before finally stopping. In the end, he handed it over to Fenris.
"Fenris, get over here. Look at this."
Logan's voice came from not far away.
"What is it?"
Fenris hurried over.
Logan had taken a tiny controller-like device from the hand of someone who looked like the commander. It was giving off a steady series of faint beeps.
"This is..."
Fenris took the little gadget from Logan and examined it carefully. A small glowing red number appeared before his eyes.
"Three."
Logan leaned in and read it aloud. "Three... what does that mean?"
"Two."
The number changed silently.
"Hm?"
The corner of Fenris's eye twitched. A sudden sense that something was very wrong flashed through him, and in an instant, an icy feeling of danger shot through his entire body like electricity.
"Not good. Move!"
Before the words had even finished leaving his mouth, the ground beneath the entire base began to tremble violently without warning. Throughout the vast space, the bright lights overhead started flashing at high frequency.
Boom!
The next moment, violent explosions erupted from every direction. The floor and walls of the command center suddenly split apart, and jagged chunks of debris shot toward the three of them.
"Run!"
Fenris's eyes flew wide open. Under that overwhelming sense of danger, time itself seemed to slow around him.
He grabbed Logan at his side with one hand and moved in a flash, appearing beside Magneto like lightning. At the same time, a spark-filled dimensional portal opened faster than ever before.
"What?"
But around Magneto, a powerful magnetic field sprang up on its own and knocked Fenris's outstretched hand away.
With the command center already on the verge of collapse, and countless shards of stone blasting through the air, Fenris gritted his teeth and hurled Logan behind him with one sharp motion.
Crack—
At the critical last instant, the space in front of Fenris suddenly rippled with a mirror-like sheen, and in the blink of an eye, the three of them were completely enveloped inside it.
Boom!
In the next instant, the sturdy command center collapsed with a thunderous crash. Stone and layers of rock slammed down onto the place where Fenris and the others had just been standing, and the entire space instantly plunged into darkness.
"What just happened?"
It had all taken less than a moment, far too fast for either of them to react. Logan and Magneto exchanged a look, neither of them fully aware of what had just happened.
They had only seen a brief flicker before finding themselves in a completely unfamiliar place.
"That base activated its self-destruct sequence. We were almost buried down there."
Fenris stood with his back to the two of them. With a light wave of his right hand, the flying rubble and the collapsed base inside the Mirror Dimension were all pushed aside by an invisible force.
The ground beneath their feet began to rise rapidly. As the layers of rock above them churned, a passage leading straight to the surface was forcibly opened.
A few moments later, Fenris stepped through a dimensional portal with the other two and returned to the ice field above.
The self-destruction of the base had been enormously powerful, but fortunately, the underground rock layers were thick enough. Although the shockwave had traveled upward, its impact on the surface was not especially severe. The ground had only sunk slightly.
"Fenris, what do you plan to do with these Sentinel robots?"
Still shaken, Magneto patted his chest. If Fenris had not been there, he really would have been buried underground. It was hard to say how long it would have taken him to dig himself back out.
He glanced at the mangled Sentinel wreckage scattered across the ground, then instinctively looked toward Fenris.
"The Brotherhood doesn't exactly have any scientific talent, does it?"
Fenris thought for a moment. "Send them all back to the school. Let Hank study them properly."
"That works."
Magneto nodded, showing no objection.
"Alright."
With that, Fenris opened another portal and brought over Professor X, Hank, Scott, and the others.
"Fenris, are you all alright?"
The moment he arrived, Professor X swept his gaze across the three of them. Only after confirming that none of them appeared injured did he finally let out a breath of relief.
"Charles, sometimes I really do envy you. Your school has a child as exceptional as Fenris."
Magneto's tone carried unmistakable admiration. "He saved us again just now. Without him, this operation never would have gone this smoothly..."
...
"Careful handling those. Be extremely careful."
On the other side, Hank and Jean Grey had already led the others in gathering up the Sentinel wreckage scattered everywhere.
It was their first time coming into direct contact with these killing machines built specifically to hunt mutants. Their towering size and cold, steel-hard shells made everyone instinctively more cautious.
And the savage, terrifying wounds carved into the machines left the group sucking in cold breaths one after another.
Instant kills. Nearly every Sentinel had been destroyed by a single devastating blow, with no more than one fatal wound on its frame.
Not far away, several Sentinels had even been melted by extreme heat into grotesquely shaped masses of twisted metal, making for an especially bizarre sight.
"This is Fenris-sensei's atomic breath..."
As a member of the X-Men trainee team, John had also been brought to the scene. Looking at those mangled hulks, he casually took out a lighter and scorched a Sentinel's body with his own flames for quite a while, only barely managing to melt it a little.
He sighed.
No comparison. There was just no comparison.
"Fenris, do you really have a way to restore that data?"
Elsewhere, after quietly listening to Magneto's account and learning that the base had self-destructed and no one inside had survived, Professor X's brows drew tightly together.
The Sentinels' power and operating systems were already extremely mature now. Even the nineteenth-generation Sentinels posed a lethal threat to mutants.
Not to mention the latest version. Even Logan, an X-Man, had barely been able to resist it.
Now Bolivar Trask and his people were operating from the shadows while they remained in the open. If the hard-won lead they had uncovered ended here, then it would amount to nothing less than sounding the alarm for the enemy.
"I don't know whether she'll be willing to help."
Fenris shook his head, not making any promises.
"It's alright. We've come this far already. They won't be able to stay hidden for much longer."
Professor X sighed, but when he heard the "she" in Fenris's words, a flicker of surprise passed through his eyes.
"I'll leave things here to you, then."
Fenris nodded to the group, turned, opened a dimensional portal, and left the ice field.
(End of Chapter)
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