The Beast paused, allowing his words to sink in. The crowd was astonished at his endorsement of Magneto, very few, perhaps even none of them having previously had any understanding of the nature of the conflict between Magneto and the X-Men. He didn’t look at Trish, but he knew that she, too, would be taken aback by his words.
“How can you say that?” a woman called from the crowd. “You X-jerks have hounded him from the get-go.”
“Perhaps that is the way it seemed,” the Beast answered. “The truth is much more subtle. Magneto is of the philosophy that humans are inherently flawed and cannot be forgiven those flaws, that they must be subjugated in order for mutantkind to be free, even to prosper. What he leaves out of that equation every time is that, regardless of whatever mutations we have received, gifts or curses, we are all essentially human. We are equally flawed.
“Maybe the reason we hate humanity so much, aside from the pain we have felt, is that they constantly remind us of those flaws. They are our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, and friends. Like the American civil war, genetic warfare can only lead to the murder of your own loved ones. Are you prepared to do that? Even if your family has turned its back on you, are you prepared to take their lives in return?
“The X-Men have a vision, a dream. We believe that with time and effort, humans and mutants can learn to peacefully coexist.
“Through the actions Magneto has taken in the past twenty-four hours, he has endangered that dream. Further, he is doomed to failure.”
“Sez you!” a burly man in the crowd screamed angrily. “Why the hell should we listen to you? We got our own world now, our own homes! This is just the beginning.”
The Beast hung his head. He knew it was hopeless, but just as certainly, he knew he had to try. These people belonged for the first time in so many years, in a lifetime for some. They weren’t going to give that up. Humanity had wielded the power of majority over them for so long. Now that they had a taste of power, they would never surrender it.
“Humans are a dangerous animal,” the Beast said, not missing the irony of his words. “We—and I include all of us humans gathered here today—we guard what is ours jealously, become violent at the merest hint that it might be taken away. Like all animals, that includes territory. Throughout history there have been examples of humans destroying the land, through scorched earth or salting, that they were about to lose. Out of nothing but spite. If they could not protect it, they would destroy it.
“Don’t think that can’t happen here! Don’t think, even for a moment, that if you become a large enough threat, the world won’t turn around and decide to erase your little empire from the face of the Earth. If they decide to do that, Magneto cannot protect you. The Sentinels cannot protect you. You’ll be shadows on the wall, like the innocents slaughtered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Off to one side, Magneto began to applaud.
“Oh, well done, Dr. McCoy, but you’re beginning to rave now, so we’ll have to put an end to your little show,” he said. “I think the people have made up their minds.”
Magneto turned toward the crowd, displaying a showmanship the Beast would never have thought he had the patience for.
“Haven’t you?” Magneto asked them.
The crowd roared.
Defeated, the Beast lowered his gaze.
“My turn,” Magneto whispered by his ear, then stepped to the front of the platform and raised his arms.
When the crowd roared again, Hank could not help but be reminded of a charismatic little man whose mad vision had led to the murder of millions. It was sickeningly ironic that Magneto was a Jew whose family had fallen victim to the Nazis late in World War II. Just as abused children grow to become abusers, Magneto the victim had become Magneto the tyrant, prepared to sacrifice another race for the supremacy of his own.
“My people, my Acolytes,” he began, and they roared again. “I know many of you think we have already won. We have stolen the center of American business out from under humanity’s nose. We have stood up for ourselves, carved a home where mutants can not be discriminated against. We have a sanctuary.
“But a sanctuary is only the beginning, a haven is nothing more than a resting place. And we can rest, now, for a day or two, as the humans slowly realize that there is nothing they are able to do, or, if the Beast is to be believed, nothing they are willing to do to stop us. For most certainly, we can repel any but the most apocalyptic of attacks, and they would never sacrifice this entire city just to claim victory. That would be more foolish than even I believe them to be.
“So we allow them two or three days, respite …”
Magneto paused then, and there was utter silence. The Beast could feel the excitement in the air, but it was more than that. He was horrified as he found the word he searched for. The way the crowd treated Magneto was more than reverence, it was worship. He glanced quickly at Trish, and saw that she and her cameraman were on the job, recording everything.
“Then we expand our borders!” Magneto cried.
The crowd went wild.
* * *
BISHOP listened to Magneto rant, and the madman’s words froze his heart. He wanted nothing less than to rule the world, to ride herd over humanity and make them slaves. It was a fruitless endeavor, Bishop knew. It was destined to backfire, to create a world where the opposite was true. While Magneto was trying to free his people to live as equals in society, he was actually dooming them to suffer as slaves. For Bishop, that was reality.
A reality he could not allow to come to pass.
Magneto had created the restraints he wore specifically to hold the X-Men. He knew them all, knew their powers, well enough to calibrate the restrains specifically to prevent each of them from using their powers. But when Magneto had been closest to the X-Men, Bishop had still been living in the future. The two had never held a conversation, never really faced one another in battle. Magneto was aware of Bishop, certainly, and aware of his mutant power. But there had never been an opportunity for him to truly evaluate Bishop’s powers.
The restraints were calibrated for him, personally, and for his ability. But the energy field that was intended to block his power had not been calibrated correctly. Magneto knew that Bishop could absorb an energy blast directed at him, and re-channel it as his own weapon. But there was far more to Bishop’s power than that.
As the Beast spoke, and now, as Magneto droned on, outlining plans and responsibilities that Bishop vowed would never be fulfilled, he had siphoned energy from the very restraints meant to prevent him from using his power. Slowly, he drained the restraints on his hands and neck, absorbing the power into his every cell until he fairly shone with its radiance.
“Now, then, my friends,” Magneto crowed. “What say you?”
“All hail Magneto the Emperor!” screamed a near hysterical Unuscione from the platform where she looked at her Lord with adoring eyes.
“All hail Magneto the Emperor!” the crowd repeated, enthralled.
A light burst of energy shattered the restraints on Bishop’s hands, and he tore the metal ring from his neck with ease. Without a moment’s hesitation, and before anyone could shout a warning, he gathered up all the power he had absorbed. With a scream of rage, he let it loose in one concentrated burst.
“To hell with Magneto!” he screamed.
Magneto was buffeted by the blast, and actually knocked from his feet. When he spun to face Bishop, already rising from the platform, an infernal hatred raged in his eyes.
“Why must you X-Men always interfere?” he cried. “Don’t you know when you are beaten? It is over, Bishop. Over. I have won. Mutantkind has won a great victory today, and you should all be rejoicing. Instead, you make an unending nuisance of yourselves. I have kept you alive to witness my victory, in hopes that one day you, all of you honorable men and women, shall realize your errors and come ’round to the truth.”
Magneto floated above the platform in a sphere of magnetic energy. It pulsated with
his every word, and hovered just before the spot where Bishop stood, already nearly deflated of energy, exhausted before the fight even began in earnest. He had given all he had, and Magneto had been more than up to the task.
“I begin to wonder whether I should make an exception in your case, man of tomorrow,” Magneto said. “Perhaps you should die after all.”
Bishop had little power in reserve, not enough to do more than further annoy Magneto. But he was not beaten. The X-Men were a team, after all. Where one could not claim victory, there were always others.
Tensing, he feinted to the left, and Magneto sent a bolt of magnetic force in that direction before he realized that Bishop had run to the right. Three steps and Bishop stood behind Storm. He reached up and grabbed her restraints, his hands erupting with the last vestiges of energy he had stored. The restraints fell away even as Bishop fell to the ground, weakened but searching for a weapon even then, searching for another way to fight.
Though it was entirely possible he would not need to fight at all.
Storm was free.
* * *
THOSE who loved her knew Storm as an eminently calm and reasonable woman. When she had lived as a goddess on the African plains, those who worshipped her had considered themselves lucky to be subjects of such a benevolent deity. But, like the weather she controlled, Ororo Munroe was capable of great peace, and of the mad, chaotic devastation of the storm.
The X-Men had welcomed Magneto into their lives and he had betrayed them. Now, he had taken his mad scheme much too far, and in its wake was the promise of death and destruction on a massive scale. He might well have ruined the future for all mutants. Before he brought the world to war, he had to be stopped.
Storm was aware of all of these things. But at the moment Bishop set her free, she was not conscious of them. Rather, she thought only of Magneto’s betrayal of her and her trust. Of being wrapped in that metallic shroud by a man who knew exactly, precisely what it would do to her psyche. She was vulnerable in that way, and Magneto had violated her as surely as if his attack had been more intimate, more physical.
“Magneto!” she screamed, bearing herself aloft on a chill, angry wind.
Down came the storm.
Ororo did not concentrate. Instead, she allowed her righteous fury to tap into her mutant powers, channeling the energy of that anger into the atmosphere. In seconds, the sky darkened and it seemed as though dusk had come to Times Square. Thunder clouds, black and pregnant with moisture, were spontaneously generated above.
Lightning crashed down at her command, striking the platform nearly one hundred times in less than a minute. Fire broke out on the wooden dais, and in several places, it collapsed beneath the Acolytes. Storm saw Bishop, now bound once more, fall through to the pavement below. It barely registered.
“You must be stopped, Magneto!” she screamed between the whipcrack booms of thunder. “For the sake of us all!”
Far below where she floated amongst the clouds, which had now blocked the sun so thoroughly that it might have been midnight rather than noon, Storm could see Magneto and his Acolytes scrambling. She had created a cloud base low to the ground, effectively fogging in Times Square so that none of them could see more than ten feet in front of them. Fortunately, part of her mutant ability to control the weather had been enhanced perception in such cases.
“Find her!” Magneto shouted. “Kill her if you must!”
And so his true colors were revealed, Storm thought. For all his talk of “rehabilitating” the X-Men, he was just as happy to kill them in the end.
The thunder increased in intensity. No longer did it sound like a distant explosion. It was closer, a deep bass rumble that pounded the ears and buffeted the body as violently as the wind itself. Each thunderstrike was longer than the last, until it sounded as though the sky was being violently rent asunder. Storm brought her wrath down upon the crowd. She willed the black clouds to open wide, to pour out their wet burden onto the streets below. But when it fell, it fell not as rain, but as sleet and hail. Ice pelted Magneto’s followers, driving them from the street.
Finally, though she herself remained nearly immobile, held aloft by gentle winds at cross currents, Storm lashed out at Magneto’s hordes with the wind itself. Fifty, sixty, eighty mile-per-hour winds whipped through Times Square, and the pieces of the platform began to blow away. At one hundred and ten miles per hour, it began to tear itself even further apart. Those people not already inside were beginning to grab hold of things to keep themselves from blowing away. Some already had. Storm vowed that the only thing left standing in Times Square would be the Blob. Then she reconsidered. Perhaps, she thought, it was time to test Fred Dukes’ claim that there was nothing on Earth that could move him against his will.
The more destructive forms of precipitation did not reach her, but Storm allowed the rain to drench her entirely. Her hair hung, heavy with it, and partially across her face. With a toss of her head, Ororo whipped it away, sending a spray of water falling on its way with the rest. No longer did she control the storm, she had become the storm.
And she reveled in it.
* * *
MAGNETO was astounded. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined Storm capable of the power, the fury that now raged around him. Not only was his public address over, but if he was not able to stop her immediately, Storm might well be able to end the dream of Haven before it had ever truly begun. For the first time, Magneto wondered if Ororo Munroe was, after all, the most powerful of the X-Men.
“My Lord,” Unuscione cried, holding on to what remained of the platform with her exoskeleton, barely able to keep herself from being swept away by the winds. “What can I do? How can we kill this woman?”
“How, indeed?” Magneto said aloud, his words torn away by the wind. Just as he himself would have been carried away if not for the bubble of magnetic energy he had drawn around himself. He pondered Unuscione’s question, even as the Acolyte herself was pried loose by the storm and blown, cursing Storm all the while, across the street and through one of the huge windows of the Marriott Marquis, which had already been shattered by the wind.
Magneto knew the answer already, though. Despite his words, he did not want Storm dead. He had always had more respect for her than for most of her comrades, and this display only heightened that respect. Storm could be of great use to him in the future. Of course, if she forced his hand, well then he would have to kill her.
Still intent upon that train of thought, Magneto began to rise up through the fog, wind, and hail. The ball of magnetic energy that surrounded him glowed green and its surface steamed away the impact of any precipitation. He was surprised to find that it took far more effort than usual to keep his course and maintain the integrity of the force shield. The hurricane threatened at any moment to tear away his focus, to hurl him to the pavement, or into the side of a building or a billboard.
Several moments later, he broke through a low cloud and saw her there, at the eye of the storm. Magneto took a moment to admire how beautiful she appeared then, in all the glory of her mutant power. She was a shining example of the magnificence that was the genetic x-factor, the reason why humans must give way to mutant rule. There was a grandeur about her that took his breath away.
Then she saw him.
Immediately, Storm lashed out at Magneto with every ounce of her power. The tempest that had raged in and above the street now seemed to turn, like some predatory animal, and use him as its focus. Magneto was unprepared for its effect.
Hurricane force winds battered his force shield, and it vibrated under the attack. He poured everything into maintaining the shield, then began to muster up enough extra to launch a counterattack. In an instant, the shield was struck three times by lightning.
Magneto cried out in pain, entire body quivering as if he had been electrocuted, which, in some sense, he had. The shield lost its resolution, and he began to fall, whipped into some kind of aerial maelstrom by Storm’s power. The breat
h began to leave him.
“Command: seize alpha mutant designate Storm,” he said, wheezing the words into a comm unit on his gauntlet.
Then he felt himself snagged, almost grabbed by hands made of nothing but the gale. His helmet had long since blown off, and his white hair was now soaked with rain, his uniform drenched, and he shook his head to clear the momentary disorientation he had experienced.
Storm was beckoning him, drawing him toward her with the weather at her bidding. He saw her, finger pointed at him in accusation, or perhaps in some kind of mute command. Then he remembered the lightning, and wondered when it would strike. It was a novel moment, as Magneto wondered if he might actually die, if Storm could bring the lightning down on him and stop his heart.
He had no desire to find out. In an instant, Magneto surrounded himself with yet another bubble of magnetic energy, stronger than before. When he used his mutant power, Magneto could tap into the electromagnetic field of the entire planet. Charles Xavier might have been the most powerful mind on Earth, but for sheer power and potential devastation, Magneto knew that he was unmatched. Every time he had faced the X-Men he had lost because of outside intervention, because he had been surprised, or because of his own, foolish hesitation. Surprise had been the only reason Storm had survived the current battle as long as she had.
Summoning his mutant power, drawing up magnetic energy like a fisherman drawing in his nets, Magneto reached out for Ororo Munroe. If she did not surrender, he would destroy her. As an example to other rebellious mutants, he would impale her on the same spire from which the well-known ball dropped on New Year’s Eve.
Magneto found himself saddened by the thought.
* * *
WHEN Storm observed Magneto’s swift recovery, she was quick to realize that she had lost her advantage. Instantly, her rage dissipated, to be replaced by survival instincts and deftly honed battle acumen. He would summon all his strength for an attack now, she knew. There was every chance he had been serious in his order to kill her. She had never been successful in repelling one of his magnetic attacks, only in evading them.
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