"Damn!"
"Damn it!!"
William Stryker sat in the helicopter above Alkali Lake, staring down at the completely demolished dam and the wreckage of the base as he listened to reports from his men through his earpiece. His somewhat plump face had turned bright red, almost purple.
"Damn Mutants!!!!"
William Stryker bellowed furiously at the sky, his voice—supposed to have grown soft and hoarse with age—surging with a vigor that had no place in an old man. His once-radiant, chubby smile, which had beamed when he received authorization, had been replaced by a twisted, savage grimace. He looked as if he wanted to stain the beautiful blue sky bloodred, like hell itself.
As a soldier, William Stryker had lost his temper before, but he rarely let his emotions run so completely out of control. He could count the times it had happened in his decades-long career on one hand.
The last time William Stryker had lost control like this was when his son, Jason, used his powers to drive his wife to a mental breakdown and suicide.
If it had only been the destruction of the base, the deaths of his soldiers, and the loss of his experimental materials and prisoners, things wouldn't have been so bad. He could recruit more men, have his research staff recreate the lost records with time, and replenish the experimental materials.
The real problem was that, at the same time he received the news, another base had also been attacked. Worse, the backup research records and genetic materials he had hidden there had all been destroyed, and every staff member involved in the X-Gene fusion experiments had been killed.
Decades of research were gone. Mutant blood samples were gone. The researchers who understood the work were gone, too. Everything had vanished in an instant, wiping