"Haah!"
The strained roar of defiance seemed to signal that the Human Torch had exhausted his last bit of energy.
Two solid streams of fire held back the torrents of lightning from the sky and the Havok beams shooting up from the ground. Johnny Storm was straining with all his might to withstand Storm and Havok's attacks.
He was like a sun about to burn out. Flames still surged from his body, but Johnny's skin was no longer red. Instead, he looked like a blackened ember, with only a tiny bit of light and heat left inside.
At last, the pillars of fire shooting from Johnny Storm's hands were forced close in. Storm and Havok didn't need to keep attacking. Two final tongues of flame sputtered from the Human Torch's head, and, eyes rolling back, he fell from the sky as if all his strength had left him.
James glanced at the unfamiliar young man, who had held out for quite some time against two powerful Mutants. Then he turned his gaze back to the familiar dark-brown eyes of his adopted son, Erik Lehnsherr, and slowly shed the curiosity he'd felt at first.
The triangular Mystic Arts array beneath his feet abruptly vanished. James dropped freely through the air and landed lightly amid the ruins of Grand Army Plaza below.
He surveyed the rubble, which covered nearly half of Brooklyn, New York, while familiar faces coldly encircled him.
"Hank, you should be at Orbital Fortress Base, monitoring spatial fluctuations in the surrounding star systems. Steve should be at the Aerospace Force Training Base."
"The Summers brothers, Peter, Munroe. You're called... right, Psylocke."
James pointed at them one by one, muttering to himself. Magneto also descended slowly from the sky. The faces of the Skrull royalty, now fully copied through their