Chapter 141: A War Between Women
On the other side of Hell's Kitchen, Jean, Storm, and Cannonball came to a stop in front of a tower.
Cannonball looked up. "Huh. Didn't expect something this big in Hell's Kitchen. Must have missed it last time."
Her eyes were already bright with it — the particular energy of someone who enjoys a fight and isn't shy about that.
Storm didn't share the mood. "Don't get comfortable. This is Fisk Tower. One of the Lord of Hell's Kitchen's primary holdings. We do this carefully."
Jean said nothing. She stood looking at the building with the quiet focus of someone reading something the rest of them couldn't see.
They were still assessing when a wave of red energy came at them from above.
All three scattered on instinct. They looked up.
A figure descended slowly from the sky.
Wanda.
She took her time coming down, studying the three women as she fell. She'd done her research when word came that the X-Men would be deployed against Hell's Kitchen. She knew what she was looking at.
Cannonball — significant explosive force, but manageable. Storm — weather manipulation, lightning, wind. Formidable.
She looked at the red-haired woman.
Ethan's warning came back to her, word for word: If you run into a red-haired woman — don't provoke her. If you provoke her, your life is at risk.
She hadn't fully understood it at the time. She understood it now. Whatever was sitting behind Jean Grey's eyes was not something Wanda had a clean answer for.
She breathed. She kept her expression even.
She walked toward them, and the chaos magic moved with her — a slow, rolling tide of red that didn't announce itself as a threat, exactly, but didn't pretend not to be one either.
Her eyes stayed on Jean.
Storm stepped forward first. "You're Wanda. You're a mutant too. Why are we fighting each other?"
Jean's expression had something in it that Wanda couldn't quite read — interest, maybe. The look of someone who has just seen something worth paying attention to.
Wanda's eyes flashed. "You're the ones who came here. You attacked us. Why exactly would I join you?"
Jean frowned slightly. Wanda was not wrong. The logic of the situation was genuinely uncomfortable. But Jean had seen what Wanda could do, and if there was any chance—
Wanda didn't give her time to make the case.
The chaos magic came out in full — her eyes went red, the air around her bent, and she hit all three of them at once with everything she had.
Storm's eyes went white. The clouds above Hell's Kitchen thickened and darkened in under ten seconds, and lightning came down in a net that lit up the whole block. It found Wanda three times in quick succession.
Jean caught the chaos magic with her telekinesis and held it — threads of red energy wrapped in invisible force, suspended, redirected. Her focus was absolute.
Cannonball built up the kinetic charge she'd been storing since they arrived and waited for the right moment.
Above them, Ethan felt the weather shift through his Observation Haki and took a half-second to locate Wanda in the chaos below.
One versus three. She was holding, but the margin was shrinking.
"Professor X brought Jean Grey to this," he thought, with genuine exasperation. "The man knows what she is. Doesn't he worry about what happens if she slips?"
He filed the concern away. There was a plan already in motion.
"Worried about your girlfriend?" Carol came at him from the left, reading where his attention had gone. "Need to go check on her? Too bad."
"I can go help whenever I want," Ethan said, turning back to Carol with an expression that suggested he'd been patient for long enough. "But she doesn't need me."
He stopped holding back.
The repair bill on Fisk Tower is going to be significant either way, he noted internally. But that's a tomorrow problem.
Below, the three-on-one was starting to tell.
Wanda was bleeding from the corner of her mouth. Her jacket had taken damage. She was still upright, still fighting, and her expression had not changed at all — but she was giving more ground than she was taking.
Jean watched her. Something moved in her expression that wasn't quite satisfaction and wasn't quite guilt.
"Give it up, Wanda." Jean's voice was genuinely gentle. "We don't want to hurt you."
Wanda met her eyes. Didn't say anything. Her look said everything that needed saying.
Storm added, with what sounded like actual reluctance: "It's three to one. There's no version of this you win. Stand down."
Somewhere in the middle distance, a sound arrived — the unmistakable groan of a large amount of metal being moved against its will.
Then it hit them.
Steel — pipes, girders, beams, the loose structural material of a neighborhood that had been under construction — came in from three directions simultaneously, moving fast and directed with precision.
A voice cut through it, bright and sharp.
"Who said she was alone?"
A woman dropped out of the sky. Green hair. Magnetism crackling off her hands. She landed between Wanda and the three X-Men and looked at the situation with the expression of someone assessing a mess she'd been asked to clean up.
"Wanda." She looked her over. "You look terrible."
Wanda's mouth curved. "Call me sis, Lorna."
Lorna Dane — Polaris. Wanda's half-sister, on their father's side. She had Magneto's gift and none of his patience for ceremony.
"We are not sisters," Lorna said, with the resignation of someone who has had this argument many times. "We have different mothers."
"Call me sis, Lorna."
"Can we deal with the three people trying to kill you first?" Lorna turned to face Storm and the others. Her tone shifted — no more family bickering, just focus. "Okay. Let's go."
"It's two on three now," Wanda said. "Still not great odds."
"Not two," Lorna said. She had a very small smile.
"Who else?"
Silver hair. Yellow-tinted goggles. A hand holding an ice-cold can of cola.
Pietro appeared at Wanda's left shoulder, took a long sip, and looked at the three X-Women with the mild, unhurried interest of a man who had already decided how this ended.
He belched.
"These three giving you trouble, sis?" he said. "Let's handle it."
Wanda, Lorna, and Pietro looked at each other.
Then they looked at Storm, Jean, and Cannonball.
Three against three. The math had changed.
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