Chapter 192: Hunting Apocalypse — The Chase Begins
Port Said, Egypt.
On a crowded street, Apocalypse stood in the middle of the flow of people, quietly observing everything around him.
Cars rushing past. Planes cutting across the sky. The phones that people lifted to their faces every few seconds.
All of it was completely unlike the age he had once ruled.
What disturbed him even more was that he had been standing here for some time, and not one person had recognized him. More than that, he couldn't find a single mutant anywhere on the entire street.
Had he been asleep so long that every trace of his legacy had been erased?
He stopped in front of an electronics shop with a television running in the window, playing what appeared to be a science fiction war film. He watched it through the glass.
The shop owner, glancing out from inside, saw a stranger standing there staring at his television and muttered something unflattering under his breath about people who look without buying. He picked up the remote and changed the channel.
The film disappeared.
Outside, Apocalypse registered the owner's action and the result. He didn't understand the mechanism, but it was clear enough that the two were connected.
The door swung open.
Apocalypse walked in as though the shop belonged to him.
"That box. Do you control it?"
The low voice filled the small shop.
He spoke in ancient Egyptian, not modern Arabic, and the owner understood nothing of it.
Faced with a language he didn't recognize, the owner looked at him blankly for a moment.
"...Do you speak Arabic?"
He sat up a little straighter. Getting no response, he tried again. "English? If not, Chinese? Japanese? Thai?"
Apocalypse said nothing.
The owner decided this particular stranger wasn't worth the effort and went back to what he was doing.
At that moment, Apocalypse registered the most obvious problem he had encountered since waking.
The language barrier.
He turned toward the television, which had started showing a news broadcast. His palm pressed against the screen. His eyes went white.
A torrent of radio wave data poured through the television signal into his mind, and in moments the ancient pharaoh who had been completely disconnected from the modern world understood everything he needed to.
"So this device is called a television."
"And the language you are speaking is not Egyptian. It is called Arabic."
He turned slowly, something cold moving behind his eyes. "And in this age, there are no more pharaohs."
He was a figure from an era that no longer existed, an ancient emperor resurrected after a thousand years of sleep, finding that the language of his homeland had been replaced and his title had been erased.
Through the television he had learned that the title hadn't exactly disappeared. It had simply been changed to "president."
But the president of this age was not the most powerful mutant alive. The position was held by the baseline humans he had always regarded with contempt, the ones who carried no trace of the X-gene.
And the mutants, who had once stood above everything, were now barely visible in public life at all.
This was the core of his rage.
"A tragedy..."
"What a profound tragedy," he murmured.
He looked over at the shop owner, who had quietly picked up his phone and was dialing what was clearly a call to the police about the strange man in his store. Apocalypse raised his hand slightly.
The phone dissolved into a scatter of sand.
The sand swept back.
In a single motion, a head rolled to the floor. Blood sprayed nearly two meters high and splattered across the display case behind the counter.
He looked at the body slumped in the chair and felt a decision forming clearly in his mind.
He was going to change this world.
Or more precisely: he was going to put mutants back at the top of it.
He was going to make the ordinary people bow at his feet again, the way they once had, and become what they were always meant to be.
But before any of that could begin, there was one task that had to come first.
Rebuild the Four Horsemen.
Trying to rebuild an entire world order alone was too slow. He needed capable lieutenants.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Matthew had already gone to find the Ancient One.
Inside the New York Sanctum.
He found her on the rooftop, tending to a planter of peonies, and came straight to the point.
"Master, do you have a spell for locating someone?"
The Ancient One set down her watering can and looked at him sideways. "So. Something went wrong? The target got away?"
Before he could answer, she continued on her own. "If you need a general sense of someone's location, I have at least fifty methods that would work for you."
"If you need an exact position, though..." She paused. "Your current mental capacity isn't quite there yet. I can't find an option that fits."
She clasped her hands behind her back and explained at an even pace. "Tracking magic is different from most other applications."
"Standard spellwork runs on mana primarily, with mental capacity as a secondary factor. The type you're asking about is the reverse — mental output is the primary requirement, mana the secondary."
"It demands a significant amount of both, and the larger the search radius and the finer the precision, the more mental load it places on the caster."
"So if you need to find someone right now, the simpler solution is to just ask me."
"I can locate them for you. Faster, less work."
The real reason, which she kept to herself, was that she simply didn't feel like teaching.
This was the universal law that governed the final stretch before retirement: the closer you got to the end, the harder it became to want to do anything. Even the Ancient One was not exempt.
If Strange hadn't been such a natural fit for the position she was leaving, she would have skipped the mentorship entirely and handed in her resignation already.
Matthew, hearing that she could locate Apocalypse directly, agreed immediately. This wasn't a combat spell, and his desire to learn it was limited. If she was willing to serve as a one-time tracker, he was happy to let her.
"I'd appreciate that, then."
The Ancient One gave him a sideways look. The expression said clearly: is there a count on how many times you've asked me for something?
Matthew read it perfectly and looked straight through it.
He pulled a hand-drawn portrait from inside his coat, sketched from memory.
"This is the person I'm looking for."
"He's important to me."
"If I can't find him quickly, a lot of people are probably going to die."
The Ancient One took the portrait, glanced at it, and passed her hand lightly through the air.
A miniature globe, constructed entirely from the spell itself, appeared between them.
The moment it formed, it began spinning rapidly. After about half a minute, the motion slowed and settled.
As Matthew watched, the globe expanded in stages under some invisible influence, moving from the full Earth down to Egypt, then narrowing to a specific city, then a specific street.
He was reaching for a portal when the Ancient One spoke again.
"Wait. He's moved."
The blinking red point vanished the instant they both focused on it, and a moment later it appeared on the opposite side of the world, still shifting.
Then, just as Matthew had begun to wonder whether Apocalypse had detected the tracking, the red point stopped moving.
"I'd suggest you stay here for now," the Ancient One said. "If you portal over and he moves again, I can't notify you of his real-time position."
"Your security team has capable people in it. Sending them to handle this is the sensible approach." She offered it as a straightforward recommendation.
Matthew considered it for a moment and nodded. She was right. He had capable people. If he had to handle everything personally, what was the point of having them?
He spread his hand, and a sparking portal opened in front of him.
The precise, practiced motion made the Ancient One nod slightly.
This man's aptitude for magic was genuinely exceptional. Better than Mordo, she'd privately estimated, by a margin.
It was a shame his interests ran entirely toward dangerous territory. Dream Walking was one thing. The range of forbidden spells he had inquired about was something else.
She was still considering this when:
A stray round came through the portal.
It clipped past Matthew's cheek.
He looked through the opening. On the other side, Hunk and Leon were in the middle of a live training session, their target being an enhanced Nemesis.
Matthew cleared his throat.
All three of them snapped out of the exercise immediately.
"OI. All of you. New assignment."
They looked at each other without a word and moved toward him.
Once they were close, Matthew gave them a quick briefing on what was needed.
He also took the opportunity to notify Nick Fury.
The coming engagement was not going to be a quiet one. If there was significant structural damage to the area, having Fury in the loop ahead of time meant Matthew had a ready explanation.
Fury's reaction to learning that Apocalypse, the oldest mutant in recorded history, had just woken up and was openly hostile to humanity, was approximately what Matthew had expected.
What?! You're telling me this Apocalypse person is the oldest mutant alive, has more powers than can be counted, and hates humans?
Got it. Full authorization. Go end him.
Coordination is on me.
Something this dangerous cannot be allowed to keep walking around.
One condition, though.
Keep civilian casualties as low as possible.
That was Fury's only requirement. Buildings could be rebuilt. Bridges could be rebuilt. But every civilian death added pressure from above that he didn't want to be dealing with.
After sharing Apocalypse's current location, Fury immediately contacted the local government in the relevant area and began coordinating evacuation of the affected district.
Eastern Europe.
Apocalypse stood in the middle of a street, eyes white, sweeping the area with his ability in search of mutants.
It was proving difficult. Between Magneto's mutant community in Kenosha County and the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, the scattered mutant population had largely been gathered and consolidated into organized groups. Finding an unaffiliated mutant in the wild had become considerably harder than it would once have been.
After a sustained search, he finally locked onto someone who barely met his threshold.
Without any concern for the density of foot traffic around him, he stepped directly in front of a man who was clearly in a hurry to get to work.
The man frowned at being stopped and started to say something. Apocalypse got there first.
"You are a mutant, and a superior one at that. Are you truly content spending your existence in service of these inferior baseline humans?"
"Become one of my Horsemen. I will give you power beyond what you can currently imagine."
"Everything you want — authority, wealth, whatever you desire — all of it will be within reach."
There was something beneath his voice, a subtle quality that slid past conscious resistance and reached directly into the part of a person where their deepest wants lived. The man's expression went vaguely unfocused.
Years of accumulated frustration and small indignities at work had the man, who a moment ago had been stressed about being late, suddenly wearing an expression that had shifted into something harder and stranger.
He wasn't entirely sure whether the person in front of him had the ability to deliver on any of this. But he was absolutely certain he didn't want to keep doing what he was doing.
And as for the authority, wealth, and everything else on offer — he was very much interested.
He'd been grinding away at the same job for years and didn't even have a decent car to show for it. For a mutant, that was practically an insult.
"...You're right," the man said, his voice suddenly louder than he'd intended.
"These baseline people aren't worth working for!"
"They're all useless! Every single one of them with their ridiculous, contradictory demands!"
"Five-color black! Prismatic white!"
"And what was the other one — 'complex simplicity'?"
"First chance I get, I'm going to personally deal with every single person who ever made me work on something that stupid!"
Apocalypse, standing next to this man who had apparently broken into a full stream-of-consciousness workplace breakdown, felt the corner of his mouth twitch slightly.
But the Horsemen roster had vacancies that needed filling. He needed bodies he could work with, and however questionable the mental state of the person in front of him appeared to be, he was a mutant. That was the minimum requirement.
He decided to proceed.
The man agreed to join him. Apocalypse's eyes went white again.
In the next moment, the man felt something shift through his entire body, a tremor from somewhere deep. His latent ability activated in full. Something that felt boundless poured up from somewhere at the base of his being.
Feeling it surge through him, he looked up at a pigeon sitting quietly on a utility pole, and raised his hand.
The pigeon went abruptly, violently agitated, wings hammering the air —
Then it exploded.
A spray of blood rained across the entire street below.
This was the man's ability.
Blood control.
He stared at the result with the expression of someone who had just discovered they had always been this powerful and simply hadn't known it. Then he looked at the people around him on the street.
There is a certain dynamic that occurs when someone newly in possession of a significant capability begins reconsidering their relationships with everyone around them. Every face on the street had, in the span of a few seconds, become the face of someone who owed him something.
Or perhaps it was simply the weight of accumulated grievances reasserting itself now that he had the means to act on them.
He started looking for a convenient first target to practice on.
And then a police vehicle rolled slowly down the street.
His momentum froze.
At nearly the same moment, a sparking portal opened silently on the roof of a building some distance away.
He stared at it, trying to understand what he was seeing.
Before he had worked it out, a figure in a respirator mask stepped to the edge of the roof, drew a handgun from the holster at the hip, and leveled it directly at him.