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Chapter 66: Don't Question it, Bro
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Adam assessed the scene. A contained Cyclops was a bomb, and his eyes and the energy he releases have a lot of drama surrounding them.
The red shimmering energy is deadly.
He smiled.
"Bobby!" Adam's voice cut through the tension. "Catch!"
The mechanical arm holding Yuriko Oyama tossed her limp body in a gentle arc toward Iceman. "Freeze her too!" Adam said, already in motion.
Two of his other arms shot forward, at the massive ice sculpture itself.
They clamped on, their surfaces generating intense vibrational frequencies.
The two arms acting as his legs braced, while the two remaining free arms oriented their thrusters upward.
"Cover your ears!" Adam chuckled..
He activated the thrusters at maximum, channeling his Mechanical Force into a single, concussive upward burst.
Simultaneously, the two arms grasping the ice vibrated, shattering its structural integrity.
What followed was a directed eruption. Adam, using the ice sculpture as both projectile and shield, blasted himself and the encased Cyclops upward and outward, through the facility's reinforced wall in a shower of concrete, ice, and steam.
[This man solves problems with the elegance of a tactical nuke!]
[Why are they all so easy to brainwash?! Actual pussies.]
[How did Adam survive a DECADE of Hydra's brainwashing? Plot armor?]
[If Adam has plot armor, then I'm a cuck.]
[It must be Envy, maybe his hollow curse, somehow?]
The ice sculpture crashed into the pine forest outside. The ice shattered completely on impact. All the while, Adam stopped a bit away.
Cyclops, disoriented but enraged, rolled to his feet, his visor auto-correcting.
He faced Adam's direction, his chest heaving, the air around his visor distorting with pent-up energy.
"You… Cypher! You're with them!" He snarled, raising a hand to his visor.
"Right here, Scott," Adam said, not moving. "A little to your left."
Cyclops' head turned instinctively. He stood exactly where Adam had calculated, beside one of the unassuming mechanical crates he'd prepositioned.
The crate hissed open.
A non-lethal, sonic-cannon derivative, much smaller than the C1, emerged.
It emitted a single, concentrated pulse of ultra-high-frequency sound; a neural disruptor based on the concept of Banshee's powerset, which Adam had analyzed from Xavier's files.
THWUMP.
The sound was a physical force. It bypassed the ears, vibrating directly into the skull and brainstem.
Cyclops convulsed, his optic blast misfiring harmlessly into the sky as his nervous system short-circuited.
He stumbled, clutching his head.
Before he could recover, a tiny, spider-like drone skittered forward, leaped the short distance, and injected a micro-dose of the same specialized sedative into Scott's neck.
Cyclops' eyes rolled back. He collapsed like a marionette with cut strings. Only then did Adam, who stood nearby, dematerialize, only a drone left in its place.
The real Adam walked in a few seconds later, after making sure everything was handled.
He wouldn't foolishly treat Cyclops lightly, nor would he stand there before his eyes like an idiot.
Therefore, when he threw the ice sculpture ahead, he fell back and sent one of his drones ahead, and his drones' greatest capability is hologramic technology.
The holographic technology he was working on has matured and advanced quite a bit.
Thus how the holograms of him can hide the drone within, even able to release sound and heat signatures.
The holographic drones are becoming his best friends.
[One-two punch! Sonic disruption followed by super-sedative!]
[I genuinely thought Adam was retarded for a second. Goddamn Batman levels of caution in here, but with murder in mind.]
[Adam is making his way to be even more of a menace.]
[I think Mephisto will suffer.]
[Holograms are useless against Mephisto. He can sense souls.]
[Trust. Mephisto will suffer. I know the plot?]
[???] [Ohhh, I believe.] [Don't question it, bro.]
Adam took a deep breath and sagged, bracing himself against a tree. Sweat poured down his face inside his helmet.
His breath came in ragged gulps.
The strain of overusing his Mechanical Force, the psychic shielding, his curses, and the high-speed combat analytics; it had left him utterly drained.
God, I have no stamina, he berated himself. All firepower, no endurance. A design flaw.
But it was the price for solving problems with overwhelming, immediate force.
He should be able to solve the stamina issues soon, he mused.
Gathering his will, he had a mechanical arm hoist the unconscious Cyclops over its shoulder.
He carried him back to the Blackbird, depositing him gently inside next to the still-sedated and half-sculptured Yuriko. Iceman standing guard by the side.
By the time he returned to the main chamber, it was over. The Purifiers were subdued.
Beast was overseeing the rescue of several terrified, confused mutants from holding cells; poor souls Stryker had collected as test subjects.
Wolverine stood guard, his claws still out, eyes scanning the shadows.
Logan and Hank approached him.
The fury in Wolverine's eyes had banked to a simmering coal, replaced by a grim, searching intensity.
"Stryker?" Wolverine growled, the single word demanding answers.
"Gone before we got here," Adam said, his voice hoarse. "I don't think he expected us to succeed, but also, he had another goal."
Beast adjusted his glasses. "Charles… We stopped him, but just before he lost consciousness, he was… coherent for a moment. He looked toward the ceiling, as if he could sense you outside." Hank's gaze was piercing. "He asked, 'Why, Adam, Why?'"
He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to.
The unasked question hung in the air. Why had Charles said that? Just what did Adam do?
Wolverine stared at Adam, waiting for the answer. Beast waited.
["Why did Adam do that?" What did he do? Even I'm confused.]
[Wolverine's look says it all: "Explain, bub."]
[The fuck stole my wife. Like, sure, we watch the show together every day, but why the fuck is she always muttering his name when asleep? Guys, should I be worried?]
[Unless his cock can penetrate the screen, you're good man.]
[Trust me, he's not good. Don't argue with her! My girlfriend broke up with me for criticizing Adam's character! Like, what?]
[My boyfriend broke up with me for that, too! How?]
[Me too! Like, why did my boyfriend leave me for imagining Adam pounding me? Let a girl dream, god.]
[...]
Adam simply smiled, a faint, weary curve of his lips. "We don't have time for a seminar, gentlemen. We need to be airborne. Now."
If they wanted to say something, they had to halt upon hearing Adam's next words.
"I can only delay the self-destruct for so long without exhausting myself to death," Adam stated, his voice flat. "Move."
The two veteran X-Men exchanged a look. Whatever questions they had were overridden by the primal certainty in Adam's command.
They quickly evacuated, transported everyone, then Beast lunged for the cockpit.
The Blackbird's engines screamed to life, lifting them from the rocky clearing just as the first tremors began.
They were miles away when the world behind them turned white.
A column of fire and shattered concrete erupted from the dam facility, followed a split-second later by the deep, gut-churning crump of the secondary explosion; The charges placed within the dam itself.
The monolithic structure shuddered, then collapsed in a slow-motion avalanche of concrete and a roaring tidal wave of water.
The facility, and Stryker's nightmare atrocities, were buried under megatons of rubble and lake.
Inside the shaking Blackbird, Adam slumped against a bulkhead, closing his eyes to rest.
"I breached their systems early," He explained, his voice strained. "Found the silent self-destruct. Surprisingly robust encryption. Couldn't stop it. Just… isolated it. Delayed the timer."
He chuckled. "William treated the place as a final trap. Might have worked, too. It's a waste, though."
Beast, guiding the ship through the shockwaves, glanced back, his brow furrowed, "Thank you. I didn't expect him to give up the place so easily."
"But where is Stryker, Adam? And what did you do that Charles would question it?"
Adam raised an eyebrow, a flicker of genuine surprise crossing his face. "The Professor thinks it's a mistake? That's… surprising."
He rubbed his chin, thinking aloud. "He must know something about Jean that I don't." Then his expression cleared, turning pragmatic.
"But what I guided her to do was the right thing. It's simple logic. We're all here. The children are there. Where do you think a fanatic like William Stryker would go?"
The implication landed like a physical blow.
Wolverine was on his feet, his claws unsheathing with a metallic shink. "What did Jean do?"
The question was a guttural rumble, laced with a protectiveness that went deeper than team loyalty.
He'd seen the shadow in Jean. The Professor had warned him about the firebird in the dark.
[OH SHIT. I JUST REALIZED JEAN WAS LEFT ALONE WITH STRYKER!]
[Wolverine knows about the Phoenix!?]
[What did Jean do? No way she goes out of control?!]
"We'll see soon enough," Adam said with a casual shrug that felt blasphemous in the tense cabin.
"But come on, cheer up! It's not so bad. I believe in her. We're talking about a man who just attempted global mutant genocide. He's not a misguided soul; he's a structural evil. A devil in a uniform."
He ended with a short, sharp laugh that held no humor, only a strange sense of madness.
Adam felt it; the laugh, the odd commentary. Stress was sanding down his edges, making his reactions weirder, stranger.
He was dancing closer to a precipice of sanity, feeling almost like a comic book villain monologuing.
Becoming the fucking Joker in here, he mused internally, and let out another soft, self-aware chuckle.
Ironically, his bizarre, unflappable demeanor seemed to have a calming effect on the traumatized mutants huddled nearby.
His chaos was a paradoxically steady anchor.
He pushed off the wall and moved among them. They flinched at first, but he didn't ask about their ordeal.
He asked about trivial things; if they'd seen the latest Transformers movie, what they thought of the new pizza place in Westchester, and the merits of Burritos.
His tone was light, curious, devoid of pity. He understood their shattered state in his bones.
When it didn't conflict with his goals, his hatred for suffering and love for simple happiness made him unexpectedly, effectively kind.
For a few minutes, he was just a strange, handsome man with different-colored eyes making absurd small talk, and it was the greatest gift he could have given them.
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