The wings cleared the canopy with the particular deliberateness of something that wanted to be seen.
Sauron, transformed, was anything but subtle. The three-meter pterodactyl-human hybrid dropped into the cleared jungle, wings spread to intimidate. His landing was for show, not gentleness. His intelligent gaze fixed on Brainchild's task: size up the group, assess the threat, handle the situation as needed.
He stared at each member of the group with a measuring intensity, and they returned his gaze, bracing for what would happen next.
"You've interrupted something running for half a year," Sauron said. His voice had the theatrical tone of someone who found that style often led to winning. "Whatever your reason for being here, the cost will be significant."
Jean looked at him. As soon as she sensed the subtle push of a psychic instrument, her awareness adjusted, bracing for the encounter. The hypnotic vision behind his eyes tried to probe the boundaries of her mind, but found no purchase. She suppressed his attempt right away.
Sauron blinked.
He recalibrated quickly but didn't repeat the effort. The blink said it—unexpected. He adjusted.
Raven measured the span of Sauron's wings, then glanced at Ethan with her signature readiness—a look he knew meant she had assessed the risks and was prepared to act. She stepped forward and addressed the team: "Let us handle this."
---
Jean moved first.
Her telekinesis at its current level lacked subtlety. It made heavy objects just another consideration. Fighting a flying opponent required a new approach. She didn't try to hold Sauron still. Instead, she altered his angle, disrupting his flight whenever he tried to use his flight for advantage. She kept redirecting him, making the air above the clearing a place where his size worked against him.
He pushed back. She suppressed his hypnotic vision with steady focus. The strain showed in her face, but it wasn't too much for her.
While Jean drew Sauron's focus upward with her telekinesis, Raven stayed alert on the ground, waiting for her opportunity to act as soon as Sauron's attention was fully diverted.
She opened a portal using the Nightcrawler displacement. A brimstone smell signaled her arrival a half-second before she appeared at Sauron's left. She was close enough to surprise him. She fired an optic beam from her four-eye setup which hit him from an unexpected angle. Next, she used Bobby's copied ice, sending a chill over the membrane of his left wing and spreading it across before he could pull his wing away.
While Sauron reacted to Raven's assault, Rogue charged from below.
She had been moving across the battlefield above, weaving through debris and combatants, using her Apocalypse-derived strength to close the distance between her and Sauron faster than he could track. While Sauron was preoccupied with countering Jean's telekinesis and Raven's flanking maneuvers, he didn't notice her approach. She struck his underside with a blow as powerful as she could give. Sauron's flight wobbled as he veered off course in shock, clearly unprepared for the attack.
He came around.
His energy drain reached for her; this ability kept him in his transformed state by siphoning mutant energy. Rogue felt the power begin to pull at her. She quickly assessed whether touching him would help or harm, considering the powers she currently possessed. Deciding not to risk it, she pulled back and saved that question for another time.
Meanwhile, Ilyana patrolled the battle's edges, keeping out of direct engagement as she watched for openings.
The stepping discs appeared at angles, forcing Sauron to scan for threats from four directions. She darted into view at his right, vanished before he could turn, then flickered behind him and disappeared once more. She wasn't aiming for a decisive blow—her goal was forcing him to split his focus beyond what he could handle.
At the perfect moment, Ilyana drew her Soulsword in clear view of Sauron.
Sauron looked at it differently than he had looked at any other weapon. Something in his transformed state recognized what the blade can do, even before he could think about it. He moved away quickly, reacting as if he had just discovered a new kind of danger he didn't know he was vulnerable to.
The juvenile T. rex, hidden behind the tree where Madelyne had positioned it, opened its jaws and let out sounds aimed at being threatening, but which came across as earnest and plaintive. Madelyne crouched beside it, one hand steady on its side.
---
Ethan watched his teammates coordinate their attacks, evaluating their effectiveness as they kept Sauron occupied and contained.
Then he moved.
The gap between Sauron's abilities and Ethan's wasn't close—it was no contest. Ethan didn't dramatize it. He acted with the precision of someone who knew the outcome and did only what was needed.
He caught Sauron's momentum, redirected it, and used controlled force to end the transformation. He didn't hurt Sauron; he simply removed the energy sustaining his form. The energy drain needed a constant supply. Ethan's biokinetic aura was a wall—any attempt to draw energy from him stopped cold.
The transformation collapsed.
Karl Lykos hit the ground in his human form, lean and depleted, exhausted, his strength gone. He wasn't dead or a threat like this.
Ethan looked at him for a moment with the assessment he always applied.
Lykos hadn't chosen to be attacked by pterodactyls as a child. The condition making him Sauron was forced on him, not chosen. He'd made bad choices over the years, but unlike Sinister, who had embraced evil for decades. Lykos stayed put, understanding the warning, too exhausted to react.
The confrontation lasted approximately forty seconds from start to finish.
---
Brainchild had been watching from the treeline. He had enough self-awareness to remain there.
When Ethan found him—which happened sooner than Brainchild expected—the brilliant mind behind the large cranium was already absorbed in new plans. He resembled an engineer watching his design fail in real time, mind racing to devise the next solution.
Jean briefly extended her awareness across his mind—just enough to answer the relevant question, not intrusively. She looked at Ethan and shook her head. Not controlled. Not coerced. Just an intelligent person calculating costs, who hadn't considered the possibility of a group like this nearby.
"The extraction equipment," Ethan said, looking at Brainchild.
Brainchild looked like he knew what was coming. "The machines were managing the load—"
"They weren't." Ethan's heat vision spotted the machinery through the trees. Magneto's modified extractor drew Vibranium from the ground, straining the devices that maintained the Savage Land's microclimate. "You didn't measure the stress right, or you measured it and ignored the risk. Either way, that ends now."
The equipment ceased to be.
Brainchild observed. Then looked at Ethan. He was pragmatic enough to understand without needing further demonstration.
"The environment machines," Ethan said, with the flat clarity he used for things that were not negotiable, "are not a resource to redirect. Whatever you were planning to do with what you extracted — that plan is finished."
Brainchild ran the cost-benefit calculation in real time. He decided.
"Understood," Brainchild said, conceding.
He was left, the message delivered.
---
Ka-Zar found them an hour later.
He moved through the Savage Land with the ease of someone who truly belonged in a place most people would never understand. The sabretooth tiger Zabu walked beside him, loyal and at ease. Ka-Zar was blond, direct, and clearly used to working against any institution that tried to control his home.
He looked at the aftermath of the Brainchild situation, then at Ethan, assessing him with the swift, unceremonious glance of someone long accustomed to operating without support, recognizing a kindred soul.
"The extraction equipment has been operational for some months," Ka-Zar said. "I've watched the stress indicators. I didn't have the means to address it."
"It's addressed now so you won't have to worry about it," Ethan said.
Ka-Zar looked at him for another moment. "Then I'm grateful," he said. He meant it plainly, which said much about who he was.
They separated.
---
The Savage Land at rest was different from the Savage Land in a fight.
The afternoon revealed the Savage Land that first drew Raven in when Ethan mentioned it. The ecosystem thrived as usual. Two hundred thousand years of preservation showed in every canopy layer above, and life filled the undergrowth, distance, and air.
A herd of something large and horned moved through a valley below a ridge they had found — perhaps thirty of them, the sound of their movement reaching the ridge before the visual did, the combined mass of them making the ground register their passage at a distance. Rogue stood at the ridge's edge and looked at them with the focused attention she brought to things she found genuinely impressive, which this was.
Jean stood quietly beside her. Her awareness, reading the biological complexity of the ecosystem with the same precision she used in all her telepathy. She found a level of interconnection that made even the most complex human society she'd ever read seem simple.
"The Vibranium question," Raven said, walking beside Ethan along the ridge. "The deposits down there, the Anti-Metal. Anyone who knows about this place and wants what's in the ground could be a threat to the machines."
"They could be," he said.
"What's the answer to that?"
He thought about it honestly. "I don't have a complete answer," he said. "Protecting the machines would mean either always being here or having a strong enough deterrent that no one would try anything." He watched the herd moving in the valley. "I know someone who's been thinking about resource protection at this level for a while." He was thinking of Wakanda and T'Chaka, and how their approach to Vibranium had worked better than anything the Savage Land had tried. He didn't say this out loud, since it would need explanations he wasn't ready to give. "I'll think about it some more."
Raven accepted this with the measured patience she brought to problems that deserved time rather than rushing.
---
The juvenile T. rex had been with them all day.
It got through the fight by sticking close to Raven or Madelyne and doing whatever seemed right at the time, including helping with Sauron and then eagerly checking out everything he left behind. It ate something during the afternoon that none of them could identify, but it seemed happy with it. Every so often, it pressed against Raven's leg, clearly confident in its choice and not needing to think twice about it.
Raven looked at it.
It looked at her.
"It's made a choice," she said, to the group rather than to anyone in particular.
Ilyana, who had been practical about this all day, looked at the animal with her usual focus on logistics. "It's about a meter and a half now," she said. "A Tyrannosaurus Rex grows for about twenty years. Figuring out what this will look like in five years isn't simple."
"Or ten," Jean added, from the other side of the group. "The greenhouse is going to need to change."
"Or we expand the property," Rogue said, sounding like she'd already thought it through and found the answer obvious. "We have multiple acres. The eastern forest has space."
Madelyne had been quieter than the others all day—not absent or withdrawn, just staying on the edge of things like she usually did. She looked at the juvenile T. rex next to Raven, seeing the calm confidence of something that had found its place and meant to stay.
"It seems like it has already decided," she said. "That seems like it should count for something."
Raven looked at her. "It counts for everything," she said.
---
Ethan carried everyone back as the late afternoon turned the Antarctic sky into the unique colors it showed when the sun played off the ice and horizon.
The biokinetic aura covered six people and one juvenile T. rex. The dinosaur showed how it felt about flying by pressing against Raven, as if staying close to her was the most important thing. It stayed that way for the whole flight, and Raven let it, which said a lot about how she felt, too.
Westchester appeared below them in the early evening light — the familiar geometry of the grounds, the private drive, the house with its lights already showing through the windows.
He put them down on the grounds behind the mansion.
The greenhouse door opened. The juvenile T. rex walked in, carefully checking out its new territory. It investigated the corners, the glass panels, the light, and the temperature, which was different from outside but seemed to suit it. It moved through the whole space with care before returning to the center.
Then it made a sound.
It wasn't the defensive alarm from their first meeting, or the unsure sound of something trying to be scary. This was something different—a sound that meant the creature had checked out its surroundings and decided they were good enough. It was the sound of acceptance.
Raven closed the greenhouse door.
She looked through the glass at the animal in the space she had built for this exact reason. The modified panels, the growing light, the room she had once described to Ethan on an April morning, were all meant for things that were too strange, too powerful, or too much for the world they'd ended up in.
"This is exactly what I meant," she said, in the quietest voice she had used all day, "when I told you what I wanted this room for."
Ethan watched her looking through the glass and thought about how some days, everything that led up to a moment made that moment clear in a way it never would have been otherwise.
This was one of them.