Professor Charles Xavier had been keeping close watch on several exceptionally gifted mutants, and Wolverine was near the top of that list.
He listened to everything Bella had to say.
"I believe Logan has been possessed by an ancient Japanese mutant named Ogun. I want to drive Ogun's consciousness out, but Logan's own psyche is too fragmented—I can't isolate his signal from the rest. I need external assistance."
When she finished, the Professor sat in silence for several seconds. Then, measured and deliberate: "Understood. Let me take a look at Logan's situation."
Natasha tapped Bella on the shoulder and pointed toward the castle in the distance, signaling that she was going in to have a look around.
"Be careful."
"Always."
Bella moved into position while, across the ocean in New York, the Professor fitted the Cerebro helmet onto his head and extended his telepathic range across the globe until it settled on Japan.
How powerful was Professor Charles Xavier when combined with Cerebro?
If a sympathetic politician asked, he would say his mind could scan most of New York City.
If one of his students asked, he might smile and say he could search the entire United States.
If someone threatened Cyclops's life and demanded the truth, he would admit that with Cerebro, he could project his thoughts anywhere on Earth.
And if you put a knife to his old friend Magneto's throat and really pushed him—he would confess that at full extension, he could reach as far as Pluto.
He hadn't yet become the unit of psychic measurement he would one day be known as, but his current ability was still in a class of its own.
Channeling through Cerebro, he amplified his telepathy a thousandfold. Finding Bella and Logan required almost no effort at all.
One look told him everything was wrong. Two distinct consciousnesses inside a single body—one entirely foreign to the other. Something was deeply, fundamentally out of place.
The psychic energy flowing through the amplifier wasn't really his to command. He couldn't control it in any precise way—it was too vast for that. What it could do was press.
At almost the same moment, both Bella and Ogun felt it: a massive psychic force descending from above like a breaking wave. Ogun's head snapped upward instinctively. He didn't know what this was—but then, in the space of a heartbeat, he felt the layered mental defenses he had built inside Logan's mind begin to collapse.
The speed of it was absolute. His barriers fell apart like wooden boards thrown against a flood.
In an instant, Professor Xavier pushed through every defense and seized control of Logan's body remotely. Even operating at this amplified, near-uncontrollable scale, the Professor had caught Ogun completely flat-footed. Faced with that surging tide of mental force, Ogun thought—genuinely, for a fraction of a second—that some ancient god had come for him.
His memories were fully exposed, laid out for Professor Xavier to read like an open book. The terror of it broke something in him. He ran.
Shingen Yashida blinked, caught off-guard by Logan's sudden retreat. He was a warrior, not a psychic—he hadn't felt any of what had just passed. Instinct drove him forward in pursuit.
His adamantium-forged katana came down on Logan's Achilles tendons in a series of rapid cuts. Logan's entire skeleton was adamantium, but muscle was a different matter—the tendons tore, and his movement speed dropped by more than half.
"You're going to die for this." Ogun flooded Logan's brain with torrents of mental noise—a deluge of corrupted signals designed to buy time against the Professor's control. It was holding, barely. Xavier's reach was godlike, but his fine control at this scale was limited; as long as Ogun didn't engage him directly and focused on throwing up obstacles, he could stall a little longer.
Thunk. He let Shingen Yashida's blade punch through his chest and didn't flinch. Using the surrounding muscles, Ogun clamped down on the blade—then snapped his head back, driving Logan's skull into Shingen's face like a battering ram.
Logan's cranium was solid adamantium. The impact crushed bone and flooded Shingen's vision with blood.
Ogun pressed the advantage. Logan's hands drove forward in brutal downward stabs toward Shingen's chest and abdomen—six claws moving to end it.
A direct hit would kill him. No enhancement, no healing factor—just a man and his wounds.
Bella hit the scene at the last possible second.
She was wearing a demon mask she'd grabbed somewhere along the way. She shot in front of Logan like an arrow and spun, landing a kick that launched the already-exhausted Shingen clear of the strike zone.
She'd spent the last several minutes watching from the shadows, and she still couldn't pick Logan's true self out of the noise—but the consciousness actively fighting back against Professor Xavier had to be Ogun.
She raised her right hand. The Shikon Jewel was coiled around her wrist, its power humming softly—a divine artifact that sustained spiritual forms, which meant it could also be turned the other way, as a force of rejection. She focused on Ogun's direction and drove her palm forward in a single sharp strike.
The blow partially expelled Ogun's intangible spirit from the body. In Bella's perception, it looked like a hazy, half-formed human silhouette now extending from Logan's midsection—halfway in, halfway out.
She drew back for another strike. Professor Xavier's voice came quietly into her ear: "Miss Swan. One moment, please."
She hesitated and held.
She watched as that vast and barely-manageable psychic force wrapped around Ogun's spiritual form and began to pull—slow, grinding, inexorable, like hands closing around a stubborn root.
She winced slightly. The Professor looked composed, but when it came to matters of the spirit, he was apparently not above brute force. You might have consulted the expert first. Do you have any idea what that kind of wrenching does to the host?
He pulled. And while he pulled, he ground Ogun's spiritual form with raw psychic pressure, methodically crushing it the way a millstone crushes grain.
The technique was violent. But it was working.
By the time roughly a third of Ogun's spiritual matter had been destroyed, the animal instinct that lived at the core of Logan's fractured psyche finally woke up.
He had been lured to Japan with the oldest trick available—a beautiful woman, followed by schemes layered on top of schemes. Slow poison, carefully orchestrated deceptions, ambushes from every angle. And somewhere in that process, he'd handed over the keys to his own body without understanding how or when it had happened.
He was furious. Beyond furious. He had no idea whether his claws could do anything to a spiritual entity, but that didn't stop him—he swung at open air in every direction, slashing with everything he had.
"Mr. Logan—not afraid of a little cold, are you?" Bella's voice carried a quiet edge of amusement.
She raised one finger.
A blizzard detonated outward from her position.
In an instant, a killing freeze swept across every direction for more than 150 meters (nearly 500 ft). Ninja and yakuza alike scrambled out of range; the ones too slow or too wounded to escape were flash-frozen where they stood. The kind of fourth-circle magic that could reshape a battlefield—the kind of power that, in the ancient world, would have been called a miracle.
In the swirling snow, a shape emerged piece by piece in the storm. Battered by Professor Xavier and the cold alike, Ogun's spiritual form was struggling to stay coherent. He couldn't hold his human shape any longer.
"I believe this time, you're actually dead." Bella drew the Undying Blade.
Black sword-light arced upward from below—a single slashing strike of absolute sharpness, angled diagonally through Ogun's spiritual form. The blade bisected him cleanly and kept going, carrying its momentum another ten-plus meters before dissipating.
Professor Xavier pressed in for the finish. That impossible psychic weight descended from above, flattening what remained of Ogun's split form against the ground, then passing over it again. And again.
Bella examined the site carefully.
This time, she was certain. Ogun was dead.
"Professor—I'm pulling out. This isn't the kind of scene I should be seen at." She spoke quietly to the air around her.
Then she slipped into the cover of the blizzard she had summoned and disappeared.
The Professor withdrew his presence as well. Neither of them had any way to explain themselves publicly, even if they'd wanted to.
Both of them gone. The blizzard began to wind down.
Only Logan remained—standing in the fading snow, eyes narrowed against the cold, scanning the silence for any enemy left standing.
Bella didn't involve herself further in whatever Logan and Shingen Yashida had between them. She waited at the rendezvous point in Hiroshima Prefecture for half an hour before her sister came jogging in from a side road.
"Where were you?" Bella asked. Natasha had said she was going to look at the Yashida family castle—she hadn't been specific about what "look at" meant.
"Tell you on the way."
They boarded the Shinkansen back to Tokyo. Natasha produced a military-grade tablet and laid her haul out for Bella to see.
Genetic biotechnology. Cell cultivation techniques. The life-support apparatus the old bastard had been using. Exoskeleton schematics. Warship and fighter jet blueprints from the Japanese side. Natasha had copied virtually everything she'd found in the estate's technical archives.
"Look through it at your leisure. If anything's useful, take a copy—I'm handing over the originals. This haul alone should get me promoted at least two levels. Maybe three." Natasha leaned back.
Bella went through it with care.
Japan's military hardware was, as always, underwhelming—the fighter jet and submarine designs she skimmed and set aside. The medical technology was a different story: sophisticated and genuinely impressive. She was already thinking about how it might be integrated into the Weyland operation.
"I'll take a copy." No ceremony between the two of them—Bella reached over and duplicated what she wanted without a trace of awkwardness.
She did have one concern. "If I use any of this later, is that going to create problems for you?"
"It won't." Natasha waved it off. "There was another crew in the castle lifting data at the same time—I only caught a glimpse of their leader, a woman who went by 'Viper.' The Yashida family has enough internal chaos to deal with right now. You have a copy, I have a copy, Viper has a copy—this information is already compromised. It's not exactly classified anymore."
Bella duplicated what she needed, then exhaled.
The Logan and Ogun situation had completely derailed the atmosphere she and Natasha had been carefully building. Whatever momentum they'd had between them earlier was going to be difficult to recover now.
By unspoken agreement, neither of them brought it back up. They would need another moment, another opportunity—and right now, clearly, was not it.
Back in Tokyo, the unrest within the Yashida family over the Hiroshima incident had finally drawn the attention of Japan's business and political communities.
An organization as vast and entrenched as Yashida Corporation cast long shadows across everything—everyone wanted to know where things were headed. Natasha submitted the technical files from the estate, and combined with everything else she had accomplished during this operation, she was formally promoted to Level 4 agent. She was due back at S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ in the United States to complete the clearance transfer process.
Bella asked her to stay two more days. Natasha made a show of citing operational demands back home—and then stayed anyway.