The man looked to be under a meter tall, yet he had an oversized head.
A carefully trimmed little mustache sat above his lips, and a pair of large black-rimmed glasses rested on his face. His gaze was especially sharp.
The moment he appeared, the computation center inside the room suddenly came to life. Countless machines immediately began giving off low, heavy hums.
"Dr. Trask, Number Seven, the operative responsible for maintaining contact with Arctic Base Seven and the vibranium resources, has gone dark."
The man called Number One had a stiff expression, but he treated the dwarf on the screen with extraordinary respect.
Faced with the man's question, he answered honestly.
"Then he was captured."
A flat mechanical voice came from the screen. But after hearing the news, Bolivar Trask did not look surprised.
For an intelligence operative, being discovered was the most normal thing in the world.
"Is he dead now?"
The mechanical arm carried the screen along the track in the ceiling toward the other side of the room as Bolivar asked the question casually.
Compared to the giant robot not far away, a machine nearly twenty meters tall, the loss of a single intelligence operative seemed utterly insignificant to him.
"No..."
"After Number Seven was captured, he was still... still alive..."
Number One suddenly lowered his head. His eyes stared fixedly at the floor, and beads of sweat the size of beans began rolling down his forehead one after another.
The moment he finished speaking, he shut his eyes tightly.
He was a super-agent who had endured the harshest training, yet at this moment his body had begun trembling slightly from fear.
"What?"
"With that chip in his head, how could he possibly still be alive?"
As expected, the instant he heard that Number Seven was still alive, the calm on Bolivar's face vanished completely. His already sinister features darkened at once.
The mechanical arm suddenly extended, shoving the screen directly in front of Number One. A pair of cold eyes stared fixedly at the helpless man.
"I... I don't know..."
Under Bolivar's gaze, Number One lowered his head even further, and his voice began to tremble.
"Enough. Go back for now."
In the middle of a dreadful silence, Bolivar's light, drifting voice suddenly rang out.
Accompanied by the hum of the moving mechanical arm, the screen carrying Bolivar sped away and quickly entered the factory next door.
"Yes, sir."
Only then did Number One finally let out a breath of relief. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, then backed away in a bent posture.
"Number Seven, Number Seven..."
A quiet sigh drifted through the vast room.
"You know, if you'd just died, that would've been one thing. But if you're still alive, and you fall into that bald man's hands, you really will become our sinner..."
"Sigh..."
Bolivar closed his eyes. Within the unseen network, his consciousness connected in an instant to a vast database.
Countless streams of complicated information were separated and stripped apart by him thread by thread, then reassembled into useful intelligence.
"Arctic Base Seven was attacked by Magneto and Fenris, and all signal response has been lost."
"Under Magneto's power, the self-destruct programs built into the Sentinel robots were rendered completely ineffective. Nearly a thousand nineteenth-generation Sentinels fell into mutant hands as spoils of war, and the only twentieth-generation Sentinel was also destroyed."
"Number Seven's fate is currently unknown, and there is a very high chance he has already fallen into mutant hands..."
"Even Nick Fury's SHIELD has begun secretly investigating the Sentinel Program. How did he end up colluding with mutants?"
Everything that had happened recently continuously gathered and converged in Bolivar's mind. At last, he arrived at an obvious conclusion.
The Sentinel Program could no longer be hidden.
"I always knew there would come a day when the mutants noticed it. I just didn't expect that day to arrive this quickly."
Bolivar suddenly opened his eyes and let out a low sigh of emotion.
He continued murmuring to himself, as though making some difficult decision.
Bang!
A loud sound rang out. At that moment, Bolivar's voice held a decisiveness it had never had before.
"If it can't be hidden, then we stop hiding!"
Ding.
A pleasant electronic tone sounded. As the door opened, a middle-aged researcher in a white lab coat walked straight in.
"Dr. Trask."
Among a crowd of earlier-generation Sentinel robots standing two to three meters tall, the height of an ordinary human looked especially small. The researcher moved with practiced familiarity through those retired killing machines and arrived at the heart of the factory, beneath the feet of the giant robot.
"The war with mutantkind has already begun. We need to respond immediately. Begin large-scale production of the twentieth-generation Sentinels at once."
The mechanical arm stretched out. From behind the screen, Bolivar lowered his gaze to look at the man below.
"We've been lying low for so long. After all these decades, it's finally time to clear these vermin off the Earth."
"You're not planning to keep hiding anymore?"
Hearing an order as enormous as declaring war on mutants come so lightly from Bolivar's mouth, disbelief instantly filled the researcher's face.
"We can finally go out?"
Unlike the intelligence operatives, researchers like them could almost never leave this base for the rest of their lives in order to protect the secrets of the Sentinel Program.
They were born here. They grew up here. As long as mutants had not been exterminated by the Sentinels, they would never see daylight again.
Now, the newest generation of Sentinels already possessed the power to utterly overwhelm mutants. The extermination of an entire race was only a matter of time.
No one doubted the power of the Sentinels. Going to war had long been their most fervent wish. It had merely been forcefully suppressed by Trask from the very beginning.
Who could have imagined that on such an ordinary day, the usually cautious Bolivar would finally make up his mind and lift the curtain on a slaughter?
"I used to think we had to wait until everything was absolutely foolproof before acting. But the reality is that the enemy was never going to give us that chance."
"Among the mutant population, someone like Fenris has already appeared, a being who completely overturns everything we previously understood. He is overwhelmingly destructive, and he has no real weaknesses. Nearly every strategy we once used against mutants fails on him."
"If we keep dragging this out, who knows whether a second or third Fenris will appear?"
Bolivar's gaze fell on the giant robot beside him, still gradually taking shape, and his tone was filled with emotion.
Decades. He had poured decades of his life into this great undertaking.
And now, at last, the time had come to test the fruits of their work.
He had turned himself into this half-human, half-monster thing precisely so he could live to see that day arrive.
"Dr. Trask, we should have done this long ago!"
Bolivar's words immediately thrilled the middle-aged researcher below.
"Sentinel production is fast. We'll be ready for full-scale war very soon. Where do you intend to make the first breakthrough?"
"For the Sentinels' first official appearance, we are going to open with a truly beautiful first strike."
Bolivar's cold voice rang out.
"The Brotherhood!"
The mechanical arm lowered. On the screen, Bolivar's image disappeared, replaced by a small island deep in the Pacific Ocean.
"We're going to sever one of mutantkind's arms before anyone has time to react."
(End of Chapter)
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