I sent a telepathic message to Daredevil, asking him to meet me at his favorite bar, Josie's, and while I waited, Yelena found me.
I was in a disguise I'd cobbled together by flexing my shapeshifting affinity.
The no-skill manipulation of the massively underdeveloped affinity felt like squeezing cement through a toothpaste tube, but it was well worth it. I managed to shrink my frame by an entire inch, turn my eyes blue, give myself the lightest beard, and tweak my facial features and hair color.
I even got a skill for it.
Congratulations: You've learned (E) Shapeshifting (Basic)
An observant person might think I was Dante, but there was enough difference to cast doubt. Yelena looked absolutely disgusted by my choice of drinking establishment and flat-out refused to sit on the creaky barstool, much to the owner's disapproval.
"What is this now? Too good for a respectable dive bar?"
"I know you can hear the irony in that sentence," she said, standing beside me.
As an offering, I had Josie give her one of the better drinks on the menu and swapped out the stool for a metal chair that I quickly made with my Sentinel Armor enchantment.
The chair itself was enchanted, too, of course, so nobody noticed just how out of place it looked.
Yelena and I then proceeded to have a very vague conversation where I found myself being more open about my true feelings than with basically anyone, even Jean.
When I told her about what Fury had tried to pull, she snorted, not surprised at all.
"Of course he did," she said. "I told you this would happen when they figured out their own formula. And that man, Walker... that was just terrible luck."
I shook my head. "I mean the fucking odds... and for the record, I did see Fury's play coming. I knew he was planning something when he'd been so hands-off about the Stones." I shook my head again. "Still, I didn't think he'd try to ambush me with those foreigners and a member of my team, Jesus Christ."
"What are you going to do now?" Yelena asked, and I told her about Jean's plan and mine. I needed Shin out of my soul.
"Jean is right. It's better to rip out the parasite now than in the middle of an assignment. We can hold down the fort while you, uh... recover."
I thanked her. "And as for the baldie and his people, I don't think they'll push the matter much further."
"And if they do?"
"Then I'll cut them off." I'd roll back the armors, the mental protection, the free ride to the Demon World, everything. Let them see how long they lasted without me.
"Let's hope that'll be enough," she said, finally taking a small sip from her glass.
I smirked. "And if it isn't, your gain, right?"
She shrugged knowingly. "You said it."
"You've been hungry for some real action, haven't you?"
"The thing yesterday was a taste, but it doesn't compare to the last assignment."
I waved her off with a snort, and she gave me the lowdown on Aldrich Killian's crazy plan. Before she left, she reassured me that the Widows would be behind me one hundred percent.
A few minutes later, after some odd looks from Josie, who was actively trying to puzzle out the deeper meaning behind our strange conversation, Matt finally showed up in a suit with his walking cane.
He settled into the chair beside me. Josie greeted him, served him his favorite, and shot me an even more confused look.
"I can't tell if the bartender lady really likes me, is confused, or hates my guts," I whispered to Daredevil, speaking low enough that my words were entirely drowned out by the din of the bar. Pool balls cracked against each other, people stomped around the crowded room, chatted, and chugged beers. It smelled of cheap alcohol, unwashed skin, a strange kind of pine-scented air freshener, various perfumes, and the slightest hint of piss.
"Josie is that way with new customers," Matt said, "and you don't exactly blend in."
He had a point. My jacket was made from leather that looked different from most on the market, likely because it was made from Devourer flesh, and my shirt and pants had the slightest metallic sheen to them. It wasn't obvious enough for a regular human to notice, but Daredevil was anything but regular.
"What was that back there?" I demanded.
"I didn't know about the ambush until it was already happening," Matt promised.
"You didn't exactly speak up either."
"I couldn't get a word in edgewise," he said with a shrug. "Everybody had an opinion about what should happen to the, um, gems and who should get them. I figured there was very little I could add to that conversation, and I knew that, in the end, you'd do what you wanted."
"And what do you think I should do?" I asked, genuinely curious.
"I think you should lose them permanently," Matt said, low enough that it was barely a whisper. "Nobody should have that kind of power. Not even you, and definitely not Fury, or the aliens, or the Novans."
"Disarming myself won't make the planet any safer, though," I pointed out.
"True." Matt took a sip of his drink. "But you asked me what I'd do."
"Fair enough," I muttered, then got to the real reason I'd asked him here: Krakoa. We had a field up for this next part.
Matt told me a lot of things. A lot of things I liked hearing, and a great many that I didn't.
The good news was that we could safely take in every refugee and make them full citizens with relatively little hassle, and that included any mutant who made it to the shores of Krakoa, since we didn't have any extradition policies or global allies to worry about.
The bad news was that the governments of the world could fuck with us in a lot of interesting and devastating ways until we cried uncle. Trade sanctions, outrageous tariffs, and outright refusal to trade with us at all, all under the claim that our nation was run, supported, or affiliated with a terrorist.
It reminded me of how the United States had shafted Cuba in my past life.
Given Magneto's presence, powers, and the already considerable outpouring of support and excitement, the governments' concerns might not even be unfounded. I also suspected that my unspoken endorsement of Krakoa was another reason Fury had been trying to pressure me into handing over a few Stones.
I still had no clue how that mess would shake out, but for now, I tried to be proactive, and that meant putting everything in place for what was likely going to be the hardest fight of my life.
So, after bidding Matt goodbye, I went back to my dimension, rolled up my sleeves, and upgraded all of my Sentinels, swapping their Twilight Adamantium for Arcanite, and I did the same for everybody on the X-Men and Avengers teams.
Then I built fifty more Sentinel drones. They weren't nearly as independent as the first generation, but they weren't designed to be.
With their help, and that of the first five, we catalogued the details of the ships we'd returned with and fabricated cannons that ran purely on borrowed solar energy and converted my dimension into a stronghold even I would have been afraid to assault. We also assembled a small fleet of ships from the leftover parts for space and aerial combat.
When I was done with the dimension, there were hundreds of cannons, dozens of new structures, floating invisible mines, mind-breaking runes, high-tech shield generators, and a redundant secondary base Rin had chosen at random, which I built out so that, in the event all of my enchantments were compromised, he could flee there with the kids, the Stones, and basically everybody who needed saving.
The preparations didn't stop there. I did a thousand other things in the month or so that followed, all of them either fortifying Krakoa so that the world governments wouldn't get any ideas or transporting everybody out of my dimension so that the kids and the at-risk refugee mutants wouldn't be put in harm's way during the process.
Jean had to pull them all out of their pods and artificially induce comas, as much as it pained her.
During that time, I suffered in the public eye, especially once people learned that I was partnering with Magneto on Krakoa, and I took a backseat to the globe-trotting and world-saving in general.
I was far more preoccupied with creating countermeasures to keep Lauren occupied during the process.
That included a lot of training for the Widows and Fury's team, especially Walker. After I read Fury in on my plan, he predictably tried to take away the Stones again, but I made my stance very clear.
Walker had, surprisingly, broken the stalemate, offering to help, and I took it.
We had over fifty training sessions, and each one saw Walker improve in leaps and bounds. He was stronger than me by the end of the training session, but was by no means ready for Lauren.
By the end of the preparation craze, I gathered the people in my inner circle into my dimension and had them watch while I pulled out Yamato, with the Space Stone still stuck to its hilt, and stabbed myself in the chest.
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