"I..."
With his mind restored, Stryker froze for a moment. It took him a long while to fully realize the state he was in.
Looking at what was barely still a human body, Stryker, now so numb he could no longer even tell what pain was, suddenly let out a ragged laugh.
"Hah... hahaha, cough!"
"So... this is how it ends for me..."
"Fenris..."
Using the last of his strength, Stryker slowly turned his head to look at Fenris.
Even in his dreams, he never could have imagined that this former Level Two mutant, once as insignificant as an ant, a defective specimen with nothing but a pitiful healing factor who had been butchered at will on an operating table, would one day become the very hand that pushed him into the abyss.
"My research..."
Feeling his consciousness beginning to blur, Stryker struggled to keep his eyes open, desperately forcing out words that had nearly become inaudible mutters. "Don't... let my research..."
"Mutants... all of them..."
"Hhk..."
Fenris quietly watched as the once-glorious mad scientist slowly lost consciousness. His throat tightened slightly. He reached out, and his fingertips paused over Stryker's eyelids for a moment.
"Stryker, in truth, you and I are not all that different."
Fenris suddenly turned away, found a clean lab coat, and draped it over Stryker's body, leaving him with the last scraps of dignity.
"Goodbye, Stryker."
After a brief pause, Fenris drew a breath, and a wave of scorching fire suddenly burst from his mouth, reducing everything in the lab to nothing.
...
Outside the laboratory.
The main building, built at enormous expense, was already falling apart. There was even still a faint trace of blood in the air.
It was already dusk. The last light of the setting sun streamed through the shattered glass, coating Fenris in a layer of gold.
His final enemy was dead. He had used every method he could on him, and yet Fenris did not feel as relieved as he had imagined.
But as his long shadow stretched behind him, the chains he had carried for so long had finally fallen away in silence.
"The end is also a new beginning."
After letting out a long breath, Fenris opened a dimensional portal and returned to the school.
The materials Stryker had refused to let go of even at the very end, the work of his lifetime, had all been packed up and brought back by Fenris.
They included a huge number of documents on mutant modification, mutant power transplantation, mutant dissection, X-gene research, and more.
Fenris sat amid piles of files like a mountain. Every study in them had been built on a vast number of live experiments, and each was accompanied by disturbingly clear photographs.
"There is a good chance mutants themselves do not understand mutants as well as Stryker did."
Fenris looked through them in astonishment. Stryker had poured nearly his whole life into this field. For mutants as a whole, though, the price had been far too great.
No wonder Stryker had been able to play both Magneto and Professor X in circles through sheer force of planning. If he had only possessed enough raw power to back it up, his plan probably really could have succeeded.
As Fenris kept reading, he even found the experimental records from when Logan had been implanted with adamantium.
He set those aside, planning to give them to Logan when the time was right. Then several older-looking files suddenly caught his attention.
"Sentinel robots..."
Fenris lifted a brow and glanced at the signature at the bottom of the file.
Bolivar Trask.
"The father of the Sentinels. Bolivar."
Unlike Stryker, who hated mutants with obsessive intensity, Bolivar had greatly admired mutant powers. He had seen mutants both as humanity's saviors and as the ultimate enemy humanity would one day have to struggle against together.
Stryker's views had once been deeply influenced by Bolivar, but after his own son, Jason, caused the death of his wife, he had gone to the opposite extreme.
Since Stryker had worked as Bolivar's assistant in his younger days, Fenris was not surprised to find Trask-related material here.
"Could this Sentinel program still be moving forward in secret?"
Fenris made a quiet sound of surprise, but after reading more closely, he found that the file contained only some abandoned Sentinel proposals that had once been used, along with a few pieces of trivial information.
As for the project's current progress, there was not a single useful detail.
"No. I need to keep an eye on this when I get the chance."
Fenris did not particularly care about the fate of mutants as a whole. He was not that concerned with them.
But after spending time here, he also genuinely did not want everything familiar at this school to be destroyed.
More importantly, in that future where the Sentinels ran wild, it was not only mutants who suffered.
As the Sentinels evolved, ordinary humans carrying dormant X-genes, and even ordinary humans who simply wanted to help mutants, all ended up caught in the slaughter as well.
And once the Sentinels fully spiraled out of control, they nearly brought down the entire order of human civilization.
If the Sentinel program really was continuing in secret, then it was most likely still in development right now. With the power of Professor X and Magneto, snuffing it out at this stage would not be especially difficult.
"I'll leave that headache to the Professor."
After flipping through the files a little more, Fenris tossed them aside.
"And these locations for the mutant research bases... these would probably be more useful to Magneto. He is the best at taking people somewhere and wrecking the place..."
"And the assassination plan for the president was neatly filed away like an archive. I honestly cannot tell if Stryker was meticulous or just stupid... I'll trade that to Nick Fury for something useful in a couple of days..."
Ding!
A crisp chime suddenly rang out, pulling Fenris's attention away from the files.
"Who is it?"
"It's me, Fenris."
Scott's voice burst urgently from the communicator, the trembling edge of it thick with panic. "Where are you right now?"
"What happened?" Fenris asked. "What's going on?"
"We're at the dam base at Alkali Lake."
Scott kept it short. "Just now, Magneto had Emma Frost control Jason, and then used Jason to create an illusion for the Professor, who was wearing a neural inhibitor, so he could use the Professor's powers to kill billions of ordinary people."
"But when we got there and were about to stop him, Emma Frost suddenly released her control over Jason at the critical moment, and the Professor woke up."
"As expected."
Fenris understood immediately.
"Then their side started fighting among themselves and left, leaving us trapped inside the dam base."
Scott was speaking incredibly fast. "But the fight earlier practically turned the whole base into Swiss cheese. The dam is about to break, and our Blackbird is stuck in the ice. It can't take off."
"We need your help right now. You have to come save us!"
In the chaos, a burst of noise crackled through the communicator, and then the signal from the other end was abruptly cut off.
"If you don't get here soon, we're all going to be washed awa-"
Beeeep-
(End of Chapter)
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