This trip through the streets of Utopia showed Charles much, and as a smart man, he learned even more from what he saw.
He saw firsthand what a world where mutants could use their powers openly looked like.
And it was beautiful.
There were so many wondrous and strange abilities, and as he had always preached, there were no useless mutations.
Once upon a time, Erik had been the only one to divide their kind based on whether he thought their mutations were useful, or if they were failures.
Something based entirely on his own view of whether or not they could be useful in his fight for mutant supremacy.
It was, naturally, something Charles never agreed with; he had happily taken in those Erik deemed unworthy. One could even say that the reason he was never harder on Erik was that his old friend often sent children to him.
Those who were weak or young, he would save them and let Charles protect and teach them.
And now, he had been proven right; even those who couldn't fight still had a precious gift that could be used for good.
Whether it was Grandmaster Shimmer, who had made a name for himself through crystal art, or one of the countless other mutants who tried to find a way they could use their mutation for something meaningful.
Even Charles was amazed at some of the creative ways many strange mutations could be used.
One example was an advertisement he saw in which a mutant with a weak acid-slime mutation offered his services to clear clogged drains.
It was too weak to be used for combat of any kind, but indeed, using it for something like that was very effective; adding normal plumbing services on top of it, it was indeed a suitable career.
This was everything he had dreamed about: the world he had promised the students of his school, a world in which they would be accepted as they were.
A world where they didn't have to feel shame about what they were, or their gifts, but instead, a world that accepted what made them special.
He also realized that this was something he could never have achieved on his own. Some of the things he had seen around the city were only possible because it was such a large place, and because there were other cities and towns around that welcomed them.
In short, there was the necessary customer base.
Just his school? It wouldn't have been enough for this.
And he finally realized why the people of Albion had been able to accept mutants so quickly.
It was not just because they weren't afraid, since they had their own superpowered defenders.
Instead, it was because this city perfectly showed the wonders mutants could bring to the world, and showed them that mutants had no intention of replacing or conquering them, but instead just wanted to live together in peace.
It was like a perfect showcase for the good side of mutants, for everything Charles had ever said about mutants not being monsters.
He looked down at his hands, at the fingers that had once typed out speeches of peace, that had once guided the minds of a generation toward a better future.
He had tried to build that future, one student at a time, one speech at a time. But he had always been fighting against the current, against a tide of fear and hatred that seemed insurmountable.
Erik, with all his flaws, with all his rage and his single-minded focus, had done what Charles could not. He had built a sanctuary, tangible proof of their dream.
And Arthuria, the Once and Future King, had provided the shield, the protection, the political will that had allowed that sanctuary to flourish.
It was a humbling realization, a bitter pill to swallow.
But it was also a liberating one.
For the first time in a long time, Charles felt a sense of hope, a genuine belief that the dream he had so fiercely championed was not just a foolish fantasy, but a real, achievable goal.
------
Time continued to pass, and the fight against the endless army of Sentinels continued without a break. While the casualties had gone down since the first few days, the fighting was far from over.
After all, while the heroes had managed to create several safe zones, this also allowed the Sentinels to focus their attacks and learn faster.
Their greatest strength and weakness was that they were a single, massive network; all their data and experiences were shared.
If they learned how to defeat one hero in one place, they all would.
While this did make them vulnerable to electronic attacks, the network itself was also heavily protected; the Illuminati were hard at work trying to break it, but the security around it was unlike anything they had ever seen.
Not only was it not connected to the internet, making a direct attack impossible, but it also seemed to have its own dedicated internal network, one protected by something far more advanced than any of them had seen before.
In the end, it was a war of attrition, a war the heroes of the world were losing. Their numbers were finite; their energy was not limitless. The Sentinels, on the other hand, were a seemingly endless tide, a relentless army of destruction that showed no signs of slowing down.
Still, it wasn't just the Sentinels who were learning. On humanity's side stood the greatest minds, united in purpose; they worked to solve the problem.
It was by no means easy, and it was all the more challenging because they also had to put down their work and calculations to go out and fight.
Slowly, progress turned to a crawl, something the world was anything but pleased with.
Because the imminent crisis seemed to be over, everyone suddenly started cursing and shouting.
Humanity as a race truly had an ugly side, and once again, it was brought to the surface as stress and fear gave way to hate and blame.
And the easiest target for this hate was not the machines they were fighting, but the very people those machines were built to destroy.
Mutants.
The old hatreds, the old prejudices, resurfaced with a vengeance. Fear, once a smoldering ember, now roared into an inferno, consuming reason, compassion, and common sense.
People were scared, tired of war. And in that fear, they looked for someone to blame, someone to punish for the chaos that had engulfed their lives.
And the mutants, with their strange powers and their very visible otherness, were the perfect scapegoats.
The whispers started small, in dark corners of the internet, in hushed conversations in crowded bars. "This is their fault," they would say. "If it weren't for them, these machines would never have been built."
Then the whispers grew louder, more confident, more venomous. They appeared on news channels, in opinion pieces, in the rantings of charismatic demagogues who saw an opportunity in the chaos.
They painted the mutants as a plague, a cancer on humanity, a threat that had to be eradicated at all costs. They twisted the facts, distorted the truth, and preyed on the fears of a desperate populace.
And what made it worse was that while they were forced to sleep and hide in shelters, constantly fearing for their lives, the mutants were sleeping in their own beds, cooking warm meals while they had cold, tasteless rations.
This inequality, no matter how reasonable it was, only served to fuel the hatred further, making them forget that the mutants were innocent in all this.
They blamed them, and they blamed Albion, because Albion was still peaceful; the people there, mutants or not, were safe and untouched.
And while Albion bore no blame for any of what was happening, they were still forced to carry it, because those who were at fault—the governments, the mutant hate groups, the companies that backed the Sentinel Project—were desperate to shift the blame.
None were more guilty of this than Donald Pierce of the Hellfire Club.
He had fully backed the Sentinel Project, all with the goal of taking control of the Sentinels once they were finished, yet now... all his efforts had returned to haunt him.
He was no filthy mutant, but that didn't mean he was safe, and he feared death more than most.
Yet all his fear just gave birth to rage.
He raged over the failure, over the fact that he had failed to gain control; he raged at the loss of his massive investment. The billions of dollars he had poured into the project were now nothing more than scrap metal and a global catastrophe for which he was now blamed.
So he did what he did best: he used his power and influence to fan the flames of hatred, to turn the world against the mutants, and by extension, against Albion.
He used the media empire he had built over the years to spread his lies, to poison the minds of millions with his toxic rhetoric.
He was a master manipulator, a puppeteer pulling the strings of public opinion, and he was determined to make the mutants pay for his failures.
And the world, in its fear and desperation, was all too willing to listen.
------
All this did nothing to help the situation, as the members of the Illuminati, too, bore part of the blame and were fully expected to clean up this mess.
Everyone was all too happy to wash their hands of it, to sit back and let them solve it, while offering no help and often doing everything they could to obstruct their efforts.
Not out of malice, but mostly out of selfish motives.
When Captain America made a request, it would be turned down for numerous reasons or greatly delayed while people considered it.
A request to move military firepower to where it was needed would be blocked due to the elites cowering behind the army's protection.
They cared not that it cost countless innocent people their lives; they cared only about themselves.
And with how chaotic it was, it was all but impossible to pin any blame on anyone, as whenever blame came, no one was in charge, yet whenever a decision had to be made, everyone was in charge.
This, in turn, forced the Illuminati to grow increasingly forceful, no longer making requests, and executing people on the spot for blocking them.
No matter how much Steve Rogers wanted to avoid the Illuminati becoming tyrants who didn't listen to anyone and thought everyone beneath them, he still saw it happen.
And he couldn't blame them, because he too knew all too well the feeling of powerlessness when rules stood in the way of saving lives. The frustration of watching people die because of bureaucracy, because of selfishness, because of the very human flaws that the Sentinels seemed to exploit with such chilling efficiency.
Even he, the paragon of virtue, the symbol of American ideals, had felt the urge to break the rules, to take matters into his own hands, to do what was necessary, regardless of the cost.
So he understood.
He understood the desperation, the anger, the cold, hard calculus of war. He understood the line they were crossing, the moral precipice upon which they now stood.
He just wished there was another way.
(End of chapter)
Support me at patreon.com/unknownfate - for the opportunity to read up to 30 chapters ahead.