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“Professor Logan, are you sure that we can’t go with the older students and Join you and the teachers?” Green eyes wide with concern, an eleven year old Jean Gray balled her tiny hands into fists. “I’m strong enough to fight!”
The gathering of students murmured their agreement, each one willing to follow their Academy head into battle. Logan frowned and shook his head, hands raised to silence the noise of the crowd.
“I know that you all want to fight, but this enemy is far too dangerous,” a soft metallic clank echoed through the scout ship’s cargo bay, the sign Logan had been waiting for. He waved the gathered students towards the loading ramp, face set into harsh lines. “Hurry up and disembark, we’ve arrived in Superman’s fortress. I’m sorry, but you’ll all have to sit this one out…”
“Logan, there is an emergency signal from the New-York Academy,” Prime One’s mechanical tones echoed up the boarding ramp, followed by the robotic figure himself. “Juggernaut and Charles are requesting assistance and you are the first to return with your students…”
“Let us come help, Professor!” Jean’s words fell on deaf ears as Logan’s symbiote covered him in a reinforced layer of protection. A flicker of light and he was gone, the echo of his student’s complaint left behind. “Not fair!!! I’m strong enough to fight!!!”
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“An avatar of Cyttorak… how strange,” Apocalypse waved a hand and levitated Juggernaut into the air, one eyebrow arched as the bulky man raised a windstorm with his fists. “So much power, wasted on a mere human. Tell me, Winter Soldier, will Logan come for these two as you claim?”
“He will come,” Bucky’s voice ground out between his transformed lips, past the sharpened bones that replaced his teeth. He raised a bloody and unconscious Charles and waved toward the distance. “The others are busy, dealing with the various attacks on the other academies. Logan will arrive before anyone else can interfere.”
“Hmmm,” Apocalypse nodded as he wrapped Juggernaut in a bubble of silver-white energy. A flick of his hand launched the indestructible giant into the sky, on course for the distant ocean. “You had better be correct. Your old friend Captain America and his wife are both empowered by this ‘Superman serum’ as well, what is stopping them or the other Kryptonians from reaching us before the Wolverine?”
“They will not abandon the humans,” Bucky shrugged and the bony protrusions on his shoulders rubbed together. “So long as your Horsemen threaten enough cities, they will be occupied with saving the weak.”
“Let us hope so. Until I have claimed my full power I would rather avoid fighting the Kryptonians as a group,” Apocalypse frowned as a powerful energy source closed in from the south. “It seems our target has arrived, as promised.”
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Wreathed in a halo of golden ki, Wolverine raced towards them. His claws were already extended, wrapped in his symbiote to create a deadly edge. Bucky tossed Charles aside and bounded into the air, fists extended to meet the organic weapons without concern.
“You’re one ugly pair of mugs…” Logan snorted as he was shoved backward through the air. His claws hummed, locked in a resonance after their encounter with Bucky’s bony knuckles. “Which one of you is En Sabah Nur?”
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“May?” Dan floated, mind emptied of complex thought. He was within an unknown and nearly empty heaven, alone except for a single, silver star and a familiar figure seated within its flame. “Is that you?”
His Wife sat, cross legged with her eyes closed, unresponsive to his call. Dan shook himself, unable to clear his mind of its fogged perception. Everything held a dreamlike edge, real as it was unreal.
The biofield he’d long grown to use without thought, failed to respond as he tried to move closer. His body was empty, a hollow shell of the power that normally pulsed through his veins. It had been years, several decades at least, since he’d had this sensation. He was in his original, human body, devoid of any and all of his power.
“What is this place?” Dan frowned as he held his pale skin up to the light of the star. “There are clouds far below, and the whole place seems to have an atmosphere…”
“Your wife asked the same question, when she woke to face this void,” a serpentine, silver-white dragon arced from around the curve of the star, its voice enough to vibrate Dan to his bones. “She found the answer irrelevant, in the end, as will you.”
“Really…” Dan narrowed his eyes, senses extended within himself, in search for any trace of energy he could use. “And why would that be?”
The dragon drifted closer, until its massive eyes dominated the space before him. The wall of flesh blinked, a flutter of power that spun Dan to face the opposite direction. The world behind him was very different from the peaceful realm where his wife meditated.
Shadows twisted in on themselves, folded into an ever increasing mass of darkness. Deep within the black, a flicker of silver glinted. A beacon in the night, it called out in a siren song that touched his heart.
“Because you are not truly here, little godling,” the dragon scoffed, a huff of air that swept him toward the veiled pinpoint of light. “You’re just passing through… now wake up!”
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“Hurry up and lock that guy down!” Kara grit her teeth, biofield wrapped around her body as she held the water inside her own cells. The Horseman known as Famine laughed, hands raised to swat Cal from the air. “His control over water is beyond even Namor’s, we can’t keep defending…”
“I know!” Cal slammed a fist against the supercompressed water that threatened to drive him beneath the earth, his other hand still occupied with his spellwork. “But he keeps messing with my casting, I’ve had to rebuild the entire spell almost three times now.”
“Then I’ll just have to hold more of his attention!” Kara’s eyes flashed red, twin beams of heat that Famine blocked with a pillar of water. She drew in a deep breath, a surge of air that threatened to reduce the area around them to a vacuum. “Just make sure he can’t escape!”
Cal nodded as Kara blitzed forward, behind an exhalation of frozen breath. Most of the cold deflected upwards, away from the city around them, but enough passed over the Horseman to turn his watery armament to icy crystal.
She slipped past the imobile sculptures, fist planted into Famine’s chest. The Horseman just shook his head and laughed as his body evaporated into inky shadows, saved by the power of the Horseman of Death.
“I’m getting tired of that dog-headed guy and his shadow dispersion,” Kara released several pulses of heat vision into the distance, where the Anubis masked Death watched over the battlefield. “How goes the spell?”
“Almost done…” Cal halted his hands and blinked. The deepened shadows of Death’s ability faded away, no sign of him or the pharaoh-masked Famine. “They’re gone… again.”
“GOD DAMN IT!” Kara released a frustrated breath, eyes narrowed as she scanned the city and the countryside around it. “Any word from the others? Which battle needs us more?”
“The enemies have vanished from all engagement zones,” Cal frowned as he scanned over the reports. “No students were taken this time, but Charles and the Juggernaut sent out a distress call… Logan answered, but there has been no contact since he left the Fortress.”