The Pursuit Arrives

Two kilometers away, more than a dozen camouflage-painted military trucks thundered down a broad street.

Mud still caked their bodies, and their tires kicked up clouds of dust from the asphalt.

The soldiers aboard were armed to the teeth. Rocket Launchers and Grenade Launchers were mounted along the sides of the truck beds. Thick camouflage tarps covered the backs of several vehicles, with angular metal shapes showing beneath them. Whatever they were, they did not look like ordinary vehicle-mounted weapons.

Cars and pedestrians spotted the convoy from afar and hurried out of its way. Some stopped along the roadside to watch, whispering that the military's arrival might have something to do with the fire in the slum ahead.

"You're sure that fugitive is in the neighborhood up ahead?" asked Flint from the front passenger seat of the lead truck. Captain Flint—no, Major Flint now. He turned to look at the man in the back.

His uniform was immaculate, and the oak leaf on his shoulder gleamed with newness.

"I'm sure, sir." Victor Marshall nodded, his fingers twisting together without his noticing.

Flint's mouth curled upward. He turned back toward the outline of the slum drawing closer ahead.

Come to think of it, he ought to thank that fugitive. If the man had not escaped from the Mutant research base, Flint would never have earned this promotion.

Colonel Connolly was dead, the base was destroyed, and Flint had been sent to clean up the mess. As long as he caught the fugitive known as Number 47, his rank of major would be secure. Another promotion might even be within reach.

As for meeting the same fate as Connally?

Flint gave a silent sneer.

Not a chance.

General Darian had supplied him with new weapons and equipment developed specifically to counter Mutants, along with over a hundred elite soldiers armed to the teeth.

Three Mutants? He was confident he could grind ten of them into the dirt.

"Pick up the pace," he ordered confidently.

The convoy roared forward, its wheels trailing a long plume of dust through the morning light.

In the back seat, Victor Marshall watched the streets race past the window, his heartbeat growing faster.

The closer they got, the stronger his inexplicable unease became. That Russell was a Mutant.

And according to the military, he was a powerful one who could shrug off ordinary bullets.

Just thinking about it made Victor break into a cold sweat.

He had once taken Russell for an easy mark. Now he could only thank his lucky stars that he had not tried anything underhanded or made an enemy of him.

A bulletproof Mutant was not someone Victor could afford to cross. He was starting to regret cooperating with the military.

But then he remembered the heavy weapons in the trucks behind them and forced his unease down.

This time was different. The military had come prepared. Taking down a few Mutants should be easy.

Two kilometers was nothing to the convoy. One push of the accelerator and they were there.

When they arrived, the sight before them left everyone stunned.

They had heard about the serious fire in the slum but had paid it little mind. Fires in New York's slums were practically routine.

Now the old building that was supposed to be their target's hideout had burned down to its frame. Its outer walls had peeled away, and its blackened windows gaped like the openings in a skeleton stripped of its organs.

Several fire trucks stood below the building. Hoses still snaked across the ground, and a few firefighters were packing up their equipment.

Residents who had escaped gathered in small groups along the roadside, wrapped in blankets or holding children, their faces blank with shock.

Flint looked down at the metal Mutant detector in his hand. Redesigned from the detector Dr. Trask had built years ago, this new model could pinpoint Mutants and had an expanded range of two kilometers.

Three red dots pulsed close together on the screen, right near the ruins.

"Three Mutants? That must be them." Victor leaned over for a look, his voice rising despite himself.

"Major Flint," he said more quietly, "three Mutants together will be much harder to capture. Why don't we... wait until they split up and take them down one by one?"

Flint looked at him as if he were a schoolboy who had never seen the world.

He pushed open the door and planted his boots on the filthy ground, where ash and wastewater had mixed. Without looking back, he said, "They're just three Mutants. You're seriously underestimating the military."

He turned to face the convoy behind him and bellowed:

"Corporal Ryder! Sergeant Bell!"

A truck door slid open, and the two emerged at once—a man and a woman, both lean and quick in their movements.

Each carried a modified large-caliber sniper rifle on their back, its barrel gleaming coldly in the morning light. They lined up before Flint, snapping to attention and then standing at ease with the precision of gears meshing inside a machine.

"Sir!" they answered together, saluting.

Flint nodded with satisfaction. His gaze swept over their faces, and he raised his voice.

"You're America's finest snipers. The opening strike of this operation is yours. Can you do it?"

"We'll get it done, sir!"

Their answer was crisp and immediate.

They were infiltrators, hunters in the shadows. An ambush was second nature to them.

The moment the order came, they split up and vanished among the ruins and buildings, as seamlessly as drops of water disappearing into the sea.

Flint watched them go, then turned to deploy the second wave.

For all his dismissive talk, he left nothing to chance. Backup plans, fire support, escape routes—he accounted for them all.

He trusted his soldiers, but when it came to the man who had escaped the base, he had also learned from Colonel Connolly's fate.

The best approach was to have the snipers catch the targets off guard before they realized anyone was there.

Flint believed that even Magneto and Professor X would be helpless against capture if specialized sniper rounds struck them unawares.

That was why he kept his troops from getting too close and alerting the targets.

As the two snipers reached their assigned positions, the eastern sky began to pale.

On a rooftop across from the ruins, a faint glint caught Russell's eye. It might have been sunlight off a mirror, or the reflection from a scope.

When Russell had first arrived in this world, his Psychic Telekinesis had only been level one. Its range was limited, and obstacles interfered with it badly.

Now, with his Psychic Telekinesis pushed to the limits of perception, he instantly formed a clear picture in his mind of the sniper hiding behind that glint.

Bang!

The suppressor rendered the shot almost silent, but Russell had spotted the sniper beforehand.

His body moved almost in sync with his thoughts, and he darted sharply to the side.

A bullet shrieked through the spot where he had stood and struck the wall behind him, bursting into a cloud of powdered brick.

Only half a second later, another sniper seized the opening and fired at Russell's leg as he dodged.

But with his senses at full stretch, Russell caught the shot and used Telekinesis to alter the bullet's trajectory.

[Psychic Telekinesis Control experience +1]

"Watch out! Snipers!" he called. His voice was low amid the crowd's noise, but Laura and Felicity behind him heard it and went on alert.

Even as he spoke, Russell swept out his right hand. Dozens of steel balls he had collected from the ruins lay scattered on the ground. Driven by his Telekinesis, they shot forward as though hurled by an invisible fist.

Each steel ball streaked along a nearly invisible path, moving as fast as a bullet. Together they blanketed the direction of the glint.

Saturation fire.

It was a tactic he had learned from the soldiers. No precise aim was needed—only enough fire to keep every living thing in that area pinned down.

A short scream came from the rooftop, followed by the thud of a falling body. A figure tumbled over the edge and struck a pile of construction debris below, kicking up dust.

In another direction, the second sniper instinctively used the gap after the first volley to change positions.

She lay behind a water tank on the neighboring building and spoke quietly into her headset. "Position One is down. Repeat, Position One is down. Target has an area-of-effect attack. Requesting—"

Her voice cut off.

The young man who had emerged from the flames was looking her way.

Across hundreds of meters of morning mist and smoke, his gaze seemed to pierce every obstacle and settle precisely on her hiding place.

Her finger rested on the trigger, but she could not pull it. Then she lost consciousness.

"Ryder? Bell? Come in..." Flint's face darkened as he watched the snipers' positions take devastating hits from afar.

If the ambush had failed, they would deal with the targets head-on.

"Move! Move!"

Soldiers who had used the chaos at the fire scene as cover emerged one after another, closing in on the targets from all sides. The survivors soon noticed them.

"It's the military! They've come to help us."

"No, no. They don't look like they're here to fight the fire or rescue anyone. They look like they're here to arrest someone."

"Are we... surrounded?" Felicity asked from behind him, a tremor in her voice.

She stood with Laura at the window of a room that was still mostly intact. Camouflaged figures were closing in from every direction.

The soldiers moved quickly and professionally, like a net drawing tight.

Beside Felicity, Laura stood with her hands at her sides. Her steel claws had slid out without a sound, gleaming cold white in the morning light.

She said nothing. She simply watched the approaching figures, like a young beast lying in wait for its moment to strike.

Russell glanced back at them. His voice was as calm as if he were discussing something ordinary.

"Find somewhere safe and stay there. Don't wander off. Leave the rest to me."

"Russell—" Felicity wanted to tell him they could fight together, that going alone was too dangerous.

But as she watched him turn toward the encirclement, the words died in her throat.

He did not hesitate or slow down. Every step was steady.

Russell stood in the open ground blackened by fire and smoke. He glanced up at the rising sun, which stretched his shadow long across the ground like a sword driven into the earth.

I wasn't looking for you, but you came to me. Time to show the military what real power looks like.

He slowly raised his right hand, fingers spread, palm facing upward.

Several kilometers away, the artificial lake in a public park stirred as if an invisible hand had seized it.

Rumble—

The ground began to tremble.

It was not an earthquake. It was the roar of water.

The entire lake churned and swirled, rising from its bed under a force that defied physical laws.

An enormous column of water surged from the lake's center, like a furious dragon breaking free of its chains in the Abyss.

Several people fishing along the shore stared openmouthed. Their rods fell from their hands, but none of them noticed.

One man's mouth hung open, his expression caught between shock and bewilderment. Several seconds passed before he managed to say, "Is that... a waterspout?"

Before his stunned eyes, all the water in the lake rose, gathered, and spread across the sky into a vast curtain that blotted out the sun.

The curtain of water stretched for kilometers, covering the park and the ruins of the slum like an ocean suspended upside down.

As the water moved, it refracted the morning sun into countless flecks of light, weaving a shifting, translucent glow across the sky.

"Oh... my God..." A white man filming from the street murmured to himself. His phone shook along with his hand.

"Who's going to believe this when it goes online?"

The early sun had only just cleared the horizon, its light still a deep orange-red, almost liquid in its richness.

When that light passed through the immense curtain of water, the whole world changed color. Refraction, reflection, and diffraction wove an almost unreal rainbow across the sky.

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—the seven colors layered over one another like a doorway to another Dimension hanging above the forgotten neighborhood.

It was dreamlike. Unreal.

On the ground, the soldiers who had been readying their weapons for the capture operation stood frozen.

Some stared upward, mouths open and gun barrels drooping toward the ground. Others gripped their weapons until their knuckles whitened, unsure what to aim at—the sea overhead, or the man below who had raised his hand and summoned it?

At the temporary command post farther away, Major Flint stared at the sky. The inverted ocean filled his eyes. His lips moved a few times before a near-whisper escaped him.

"Can... a Mutant really do that?"

The next second, he shook his head violently, almost wrenching his neck.

"No! That's not it!" His voice rose sharply with the conviction of a man trying to convince himself. "It's an illusion. It has to be an illusion made by a Mutant. A trick to scare us off."

He snatched up his radio and nearly screamed into it. "Set up the Electromagnetic Pulse Device! Restrict his powers, then fire! Everyone, fire! It's an illusion, an illusion the enemy made! Don't be afraid!"

The Electromagnetic Pulse Device was the heavy weapon the general had given him. Like the Mutant Suppression Collar, it had been made specifically to counter Mutants.

The radio remained silent for two seconds.

Then the shooting began.

Ratatat—boom!

Rifles rattled, Rocket Launchers howled, and Grenade Launchers thumped. Every weapon opened fire at once, unleashing a torrent toward the figure in the open ground.

Bullets wove a dense metal net through the air. Muzzle flashes and smoke blotted out the morning light.

In that moment, the soldiers forgot that Flint had ordered a capture, not a kill.

Their fingers held the triggers down mechanically, pouring all their fear and unease into bullets fired at the man before them.

[Fear emotion +1]

[Shock emotion +1]

[Shock emotion +1]