"Fenris, do it!"
Up in the pilot's seat, Scott had heard him too. He gripped the controls with both hands so hard his knuckles nearly went white.
At the same time, everyone had fastened their seat belts, bracing for the impact that was sure to come.
Hearing the response, Fenris slowly lowered his massive body into a crouch, every muscle in him drawing tight as he desperately gathered strength.
At that moment, Fenris could clearly feel a force rising inside him. His biological reactor roared into full operation. Heat began pouring off his body uncontrollably, and the blue glow along his dorsal spines grew brighter and brighter.
"Raaagh!"
After a furious roar that shook the sky, Fenris suddenly heaved the Blackbird onto his shoulders, his huge body surging upward with the massive jet in tow.
Boom!
The blast of air cracked like thunder. The ground exploded beneath him with a deafening roar, dirt and stone flying everywhere as a crater several meters wide was torn open by sheer force.
That burst of overwhelming strength came too suddenly. The Blackbird's frame, forced to endure such a violent impact, began letting out a series of painful metallic groans.
"Aaah!"
The savage acceleration slammed everyone back into their seats, their vision going dark for an instant.
And the moment Fenris carried the Blackbird completely clear of the water, the giant waterspout collapsed in an instant, dissolving into a sky full of mist.
The patch of ground that had just been exposed was swallowed again by the surging flood in the blink of an eye, vanishing beneath the raging waters.
Hummmm.
Fenris had only leapt a few dozen meters. It was not especially high, but it was just enough for the Blackbird's engines to come back online.
With a smooth mechanical whine, the vertical thrusters engaged again, the engine flames reignited, and the Blackbird steadied itself in a hover high above the flood.
Splash!
But on the other side, hurling a massive heavy jet into the air had already gone far beyond Fenris's current limit.
The strength he had forced out of himself was spent. A violent wave of emptiness suddenly flooded through his body, and he dropped out of the air. A second later, he plunged straight into the torrent below.
Under that extreme overload, his whole body was radiating intense heat. The instant he hit the water, a huge cloud of white steam burst upward.
Very quickly, Fenris's body vanished beneath the surface.
"Fenris!"
Everyone aboard the Blackbird saw it happen with their own eyes. Watching him disappear, the Professor's gaze turned blank at once.
The instant Fenris fell into the water, he could no longer feel him at all.
"I've lost my sense of Fenris..."
The Professor's low voice sounded inside the hollow cabin, and it struck with unbearable weight.
"What?"
"That's impossible!"
"Fenris was the strongest of all of us... did that really push him past his limit?"
Scott stared in disbelief. Just moments earlier, he had already lowered the boarding ramp, ready to walk out and give Fenris a huge hug the second he made it onto the plane.
Beside him, Logan was pressed hard against the window, straining to see anything in the water. But the raging flood had already swallowed every trace. After a long time, he still saw nothing.
"No. No way. That kid's too mean, too stubborn to die. No way he gets drowned that easily..."
Logan kept muttering to himself, his voice thick with grief and refusal.
Back at the base, seeing that old test site had brought some of his memories back.
Even so, in Logan's long life, Fenris was still one of the rare people he could truly be around without holding anything back, someone he could accept completely as a friend.
"He came all this way. He finally saved Jean, and in the end he..."
Ororo leaned over the controls with a blank face, but her eyes were full of sorrow as well.
She had not known Fenris very long, but he had already left a deep mark on her heart.
He had walked through a hurricane and casually killed Riptide. When the Professor was gone, he had protected the school in the middle of desperation. Then he had descended like a miracle into the flood and saved all of them...
Losing a friend and comrade like that so suddenly was not something anyone could accept lightly.
"But... where's Jean?"
In the midst of that silent grief, someone suddenly seemed to realize something.
"Didn't Fenris save Jean?"
"Jean can fly on her own with telekinesis. So why haven't any of us seen her?"
...
Beneath the water.
Completely unlike the raging chaos above, the lake bed below was astonishingly calm and quiet.
In the end, underwater was Godzilla's true home turf.
It was the first time Fenris had ever swum underwater in this form, and the sensation was several times more comfortable than being on land.
So after crashing into the lake, he did not change back. Instead, acting on instinct, he found a comfortable place and settled down quietly.
To unleash that burst of strength far beyond his limits, Fenris's reactor had already been pushed into overload. The result was the constant searing heat pouring from his body and an overwhelming feeling of exhaustion.
On top of that, he had just forced himself to use a kind of magic he was not even familiar with. Mentally and physically, he had already reached the absolute limit of what he could handle right now.
Glub glub...
"Maybe I should sleep for a bit."
The intense heat of his core kept venting through his dorsal spines, while the surrounding water constantly carried it away. As time passed, a faint drowsiness slowly crept over him.
"Why does being in water feel even better than soaking up radiation..."
Boom!
Completely unaware that everyone at the school side was grieving over a single sentence from the Professor, Fenris was just about to drift fully to sleep when a massive explosion suddenly erupted somewhere nearby underwater.
Then, almost instantly, the entire lake, which had only just started to calm down, seemed to boil violently.
A dazzling burst of golden-red light exploded outward. The intense glare and heat, as if deliberately aimed, slammed straight toward Fenris.
"What the hell is this now?"
Everything happened too fast. Fenris, who had been practically asleep, had no time to react and took the blow head-on.
His entire body was hurled away, sent flying through the water for who knew how far before he finally managed to stop himself with a lash of his tail.
A sense of danger more intense than anything he had ever felt before surged through him.
Because this time the feeling was countless times stronger than before, Fenris's heart began hammering wildly, and every trace of drowsiness was blasted away.
His reactor roared back into rapid operation, and the blue light along his back began flashing once again.
With a low, heavy hum, his dorsal spines lit up one by one, atomic breath gathering at the ready.
"Delicious!"
A distant, almost dreamlike voice suddenly echoed from every direction.
Then, in the next instant, Fenris's world lit up.
The golden-red glow illuminated the pitch-black lakebed. In that blazing light, Fenris suddenly saw a woman with long red hair staring at him eagerly.
In those equally red eyes, greedy desire was almost impossible to suppress.
"I'm going to devour you!"
(End of Chapter)
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