Without affecting external matter, she could control her own weight. Did that count as a new application derived from physical enhancement?
After a moment's thought, she explained why she had come. "Professor X asked me to gather everyone at the renovated training base for a combat simulation."
"A combat simulation?" Chen Xiao raised an eyebrow.
"Yes. This time, the focus is on honing the X-Men's teamwork. After all, each of us has different abilities."
If you took someone's pay, you did their work.
Though he was long past being a novice in actual combat, Chen Xiao still followed Storm into the underground base.
It was the same spacious training room, but the setting had quietly changed: a sparsely lit street at night, neon reflected in shop windows, and the faint sound of traffic.
The buildings gave Chen Xiao an overwhelming sense of reality.
He raised his hand and dug hard into the exterior wall of a nearby shop. The instant his fingertips touched the cement, the hard gray wall crumbled like dry, brittle tofu. Debris showered down, and he felt distinct grains and heavy resistance against his palm.
He blurted out, "This ability... is way too powerful!"
He was certain that the paving beneath his feet, the shops before him, and the structure of the entire street were real. Only the lead-gray sky overhead was a virtual projection, while the distant buildings, their outlines blurred and details missing, were carefully arranged scenery.
But the strange thing was that the last time he had come here, it had been an empty training ground, nothing like this lifelike city street.
Normally, transforming such a vast underground base into this would have taken months at the very least. Unless... a power far beyond the ordinary had been used.
This training session was restricted to the full X-Men team: Shadowcat, Colossus, Iceman, Rogue Anna, Storm, and Wolverine.
"Everyone's here." Storm's voice was steady as she looked around. "Our objective this time is to eliminate a group of mechanical soldiers. They not only carry modern weapons, but can also simulate mutant abilities."
"The core of our tactics is teamwork: covering one another, complementing each other's timing, and completely breaking down the enemy formation."
As soon as she finished, Colossus frowned. "Robots that can copy mutant abilities? Those things actually exist?"
Iceman Bobby spread his hands, his tone relaxed. "It's probably a new challenge the professor set up. I guess he thought our regular drills were too tame."
"Fine by me. Just watch me freeze every last one of them into a block of ice."
Everyone looked relaxed, chatting and joking without any pressure. Clearly, they thought little of these "mechanical opponents."
Only Chen Xiao's pupils contracted slightly, his gaze suddenly sharpening. "Mechanical soldiers that can imitate mutant abilities... could they be Sentinels?"
"Sixty-second countdown. Combat is about to begin. Everyone, take your positions."
Before Storm had finished, everyone quickly spread out, forming a fan-shaped defensive line along the street that let them support one another without being wiped out in one strike.
Chen Xiao, however, stamped his foot. The blue bricks beneath him exploded, and he shot skyward like an arrow loosed from a bow, soaring dozens of meters before landing firmly atop a tall building beside the street.
"The training space's vertical dimensions... have been expanded considerably too." A quick check told him that the dome's boundary was still dozens of meters above his head.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
Suddenly, explosive reports tore through the distant air. More than a dozen rockets trailing crimson flames screamed toward the group, making their eardrums ring.
"Take cover!"
The first attack was so fierce that even the veteran members were startled.
Some darted back, while others stood their ground, such as Iceman in the middle of the street. As two rockets flew straight at his face, he spread his arms. Cold surged from his palms amid dazzling blue light, blasting out like high-pressure jets of water and instantly engulfing the projectiles.
Freezing mist at minus one hundred degrees Celsius enveloped the rockets, freezing them solid before they could explode. The warheads stalled in midair, then fell and shattered without producing so much as a spark.
Elsewhere, Shadowcat simply did not dodge. Her figure blurred, turning translucent. A rocket passed straight through her and slammed into the road several meters behind her, exploding into a rolling ball of flame. Scorching waves of fire churned, yet failed to singe even the hem of her clothes.
It was a clean, decisive display, full of force.
Of course, not everyone handled it with such ease. Rogue Anna turned and rushed into the nearest office building, while Colossus and Storm each swiftly leaped into cover.
Chen Xiao, up on the rooftop, had the highest position and the widest view, making him a primary target of the first volley. Three rockets locked onto his location at once.
The instant the warheads entered a thirty-meter radius, crimson light flashed in his eyes, and two scarlet Heat Rays ripped through the air!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Amid five-thousand-degree heat and violent shock waves, the three warheads detonated in succession, bursting into three blazing white fireballs in midair.
Before the flames cleared, three ten-meter-tall, purple-painted humanoid mechs were already hovering in the air. Their metal joints gleamed with a cold, hard light, their killing intent as sharp as blades.
Sure enough... the professor already knows all about the Sentinels.
Chen Xiao's heart sank. The moment the first-generation Sentinels appeared, he understood the true purpose of this training session.
As the strongest telepath, Professor X could not possibly be kept in the dark about the Sentinel Program that humans were secretly advancing.
But the technology was still immature, and its threat was limited. His lack of intervention did not mean he was standing idly by. Rather, he had weighed it carefully: forcibly halting it would only intensify the conflict and accelerate humanity's all-out campaign against mutants.
More practically, even if this project were snuffed out, more similar programs would follow.
The root lay in those in power's instinctive fear of extraordinary abilities and their deep dread of power beyond their control.
Being unable to stop it did not mean he was helpless.
So he had gathered all known Sentinel data, reverse-engineered it, and designed this combat exercise, all so the X-Men would not panic and take a passive beating when they faced a real Sentinel ambush.
Yet neither the professor nor humanity's decision-makers could imagine how terrifying these machines would become in the future.
Within ten years, they would slaughter mutants across the globe. Even ordinary people carrying recessive X genes would be purged, leaving the world a lifeless wasteland.
Of course, "invincible" only applied against most mutants.
In individual engagements, even in the future, a handful of top-tier mutants working together would still have a chance to destroy Sentinels.
But the problem was their numbers. Sentinels never fought alone. They shared battlefield information, coordinated their movements, and complemented one another's abilities. No sooner had you dismantled one than a dozen more swarmed in.
That kind of overwhelming numerical suppression was almost impossible to counter, unless one possessed absolute power sufficient to wipe out every unit in a single strike.
As these thoughts surged through Chen Xiao's mind, the three airborne Sentinels abruptly split up:
Two dived toward Wolverine and the others on the ground;
The last turned its guns and sped straight toward his rooftop.
Its shoulder armor opened, mechanical autocannon arms sprang out, and menacing twenty-millimeter barrels locked on before muzzle flashes erupted!
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Gunfire thundered in rapid succession. Bullets poured down like a torrential rain, each tearing through the air at a thousand meters per second, tracing a searing, dazzling band of death.
The instant the autocannon spat fire, Chen Xiao's figure had already vanished completely from his position.
Bullets capable of penetrating forty-millimeter steel plate hammered the rooftop like rain. Basin-sized craters were instantly torn into the hard concrete with terrifying force.
If such firepower struck an ordinary person, they would be shredded into bloody pieces on the spot.
Even Chen Xiao did not dare take it head-on in his current state. He could only evade its onslaught, leaping and dodging between buildings at inconceivable speed.
Meanwhile, the moment the two Sentinels below opened fire, Wolverine and the others were forced to roll repeatedly and retreat along the walls, unable to find any opening to close in and counterattack.
The suppressive fire had barely begun when the Sentinels' shoulder magazines launched grenade after grenade, blasting the street into collapse and shattering buildings, leaving Iceman and the others scrambling in disarray.
But such dense suppression could not last. At exactly one minute, the Sentinels exhausted their two thousand rounds of ammunition. The gunfire stopped abruptly, and the barrage vanished.
In that fleeting gap in the fire, the exterior wall of the building beside a grounded Sentinel exploded!
Colossus smashed through the masonry with his steel body and charged out!
Boom!
A tremendously powerful punch slammed into the Sentinel's chest armor, instantly denting the metal into a bowl-sized crater and scattering fragments.
At almost the same instant, Storm hovered high in the distance, fierce winds howling around her as she swung both arms.
Crack! Crack!
Several thick bolts of lightning struck down from the clouds, piercing the Sentinel's torso with precision. Arcs flashed, and sparks crackled wildly.
Before Colossus had fully steadied himself after landing, he and the airborne Storm exchanged a smile.
Metal conducted electricity. As long as they burned out the internal circuits, these metal hulks would naturally be paralyzed.
Yet just as smoke rose from the Sentinel and electricity coursed over it, the color of its surface abruptly changed. A silver-black sheen spread like rippling water, and in the blink of an eye, it looked exactly like Colossus's steel skin!
It turned out that in that brief instant of contact, the Sentinel had quietly copied his ability.
Although called "Colossus," the material of his transformed body was actually a high-carbon alloy steel similar to osmium. Its hardness was second only to adamantium and vibranium, and it also possessed extremely strong insulating properties.
In an instant, the currents wrapped around the Sentinel scattered completely, as though meeting an invisible barrier.
At this sudden turn, Storm's pupils contracted. Colossus was caught even more off guard as a giant arm swept into him, sending him flying like a kite with its string cut into the wall of an office building a hundred meters away. Bricks and stones flew.
The Sentinel slowly turned its head and locked onto Storm in the distance. Its silver-black metal eyes rapidly turned a glaring white, faintly radiating energy fluctuations of the same nature as hers...
Bang!
With a muffled report, a dazzling cluster of sparks erupted inside the Sentinel's head. It then toppled stiffly, crashing to the ground and kicking up a cloud of dust.
Storm and Colossus stared at each other, momentarily stunned.
Neither had expected the robot to fail in its forced attempt to simulate Storm's ability, burning out its own core circuitry and shutting down on the spot.
Elsewhere, the Sentinel pursuing Wolverine had barely landed when Kitty suddenly emerged from the ground and gripped its left leg tightly.
Her figure flashed and vanished, half her body instantly phasing into the earth. In the blink of an eye, she had sealed the Sentinel's entire lower body deep within the underground rock.
At that moment, Iceman, who had long been lying in ambush, sprang out from a street corner. High-pressure streams of cold blasted from his palms, pouring down over its head like roaring ice dragons.
Within a single breath, the Sentinel had been frozen solid into a crystal-clear ice sculpture.