Chapter 3- Truth of the Tower

  Preserve – Mysterious tower- 2008- 10- 21 (Morning)

  Eric Lensheer- (Magneto)

  While he could easily crush these 'knights' that the strange beast-men fielded, Erik instead chose to disarm and aid his Brotherhood. He knew that one day he would not be here to protect them, so they needed to get all of the 'safe' experiences that they could.

  Curha, using a Ryth’lor dream-stone to steal his combat experience, and Deadpool were pushing ahead of the rest of them. So when steel spears were thrown at the two of them, Erik would pull them away and make them horribly miss their targets.

  As he told the person next to him, he watched his son run through a pack of knights. "Remind me to scold them for disregarding Nath’aniel’s warning ter." As Copycat grunted an acknowledgment, the boy quickly melted away the beast-men's full pte, before running off to another section of the tower.

  Erik could feel a pair of beast-men squires trying to sneak up on them, but Mystique picked both of them off before he could act. A second ter his daughter nded near him. She was dressed in the new costume he made for her.

  It was based off of Destiny's old costume, with triple-yered material hugging her body. Hers red to the seer's blue, and unlike Destiny's this one used some of Nath’aniel’s Fairy Silver for its middle yer. So if she were to get into any serious danger she could use the energy her powers attracted to make the metal reform into a full suit of combat armor, covering all of her currently exposed parts.

  Even the cloak she wore copied Destiny's, in that it had small pockets to store simple items. In his daughter's case however, it wasn't spare ammo for her primary weapon, but rather half were simple bdes that she could use her powers to throw and the other half were magic crystals.

  While over the st few months, she had learned the basics of magic from the mage, but Wanda still wasn't good enough to be cssified as a Novice-grade mage. As she still couldn't write the runes in the air while under stress. So instead she carved them into simple crystals beforehand.

  Erik still ughs from time to time, at knowing that the first spell his daughter learned was one that let her dye her hair. Currently, her hair was midnight bck with red tips.

  As soon as she nded, she used the Abyssal energy to enact a shield to protect the three of them. Then she reached up and pressed the stone that would board cast to Exodus. “I have father with me.”

  She then released it to let their knight speak to them. “I have located their leader. He is on the fourth floor, near the middle of that level. He appears to be speaking to their senior members. But there is something else. I see a series of what look like exhaust ports above them.”

  “Exhaust ports?” Erik heard Copycat mutter confused, as he rubbed his own chin in thought.

  Then a thought hit him, and he pointed at his daughter, signaling to her that he wanted to tell them something. She pressed two stones, the knight’s and the mage’s, and then he said to them. “The tower isn't a tower. It's a cradle. The top half of it is a spacecraft. That's why the materials felt off to me, they are not terrestrial, but are close to things we have here..."

  He was interrupted by a hulking brute of a goril beast-man, who threw a two-handed axe at them. While the axe bsted through Gypsy's shield. However after that, it just hung in the air just before it was about to behead her, as Erik had wrapped the weapon up in a magnetic field.

  “You shall not desecrate the holy nd!” The massive beast of a man shouted at them.

  Tired of this Erik reached out and lifted the man into the air. Then he started to crush, but the man's dense meat and bones could withstand the pressure from one field. So he added another, and another, and on the fifth the beast's flesh began to lose, so to be sure the mutant leader added another. Then the beast popped like a grape as his armor crumpled and compressed into a can. Comically, the goril's head was sticking out of the top of a basketball-sized can.

  "I was speaking!" Erik shouted at the corpse. He wiped some of the blood off his armor as he muttered. "Take a beast and shape them into a man, but in the end, it is still just a beast."

  He had already wanted to cull the lot of them when it was discovered that these ‘beast-men’ were eating humans, but when they further learned that they were also eating the Cat People that live to the north of them as well as the Swamp People to the west, that was when he demanded to Nath’aniel that put a stop to them.

  “They should be gd that Nath’aniel didn’t sentence them all to death.” He muttered again as he began to cool down. He took a deep breath before asking. “Where were we?”

  It was the mage who answered through the stone on his daughter’s forehead. “The Citadel and I agree. It is most likely that the native tribesmen of the Preserve didn’t notice the change in the tower. From when it first nded, and when this ‘Great One’ took over. Or those that did were captured before they could report it, he or his beast-men had added the newer sections ter. This means that they may have the original owners here somewhere too, we should look for their dungeon."

  "Or they ate them too." Erik heard Mystique mutter through a different stone.

  "I hope they didn't," Erik muttered, and then he thought but didn't say. ‘Any good retions with another power would be helpful.’

  “We can’t let them all escape, they'll just eat people somepce else if they get away," Rogue said from the st stone on Gypsy's head.

  ‘She’s right.’ Erik admitted mentally.

  “Agreed, Magneto your powers are needed to stop them from getting away.” The mage ordered. Then a rift of energy opened in the air above everyone, instead of falling as gravity intended. The energy wave shot up and melted the ceiling.

  Seeing that as his signal, he rewrapped himself in a magnetic field and flew up toward the aircraft-sized hole in the ceiling. Exodus joined him at some point during the flight, and before the two of them got to the next floor, the leader told the light maniputor. "Do it now."

  Exodus nodded. He tapped the stones on his head twice as a warning to everyone, before he used his powers to amplify the light just above the mirrors this pce used to illuminate the interiors. It took a second, for the light to spread, but once it did all of the open bottom area was suddenly blinded by the sudden increase of light being streamed into it.

  His members of the brotherhood who had heeded the warning should have had enough time to cover their eyes and only be dazzled, while all of the beast-men, especially those with enhanced vision, would be blind for a moment.

  Once through the hole Magneto felt with his powers rather than looked for their enemies.

  He could feel a squad near, not wanting another mess, he pulled rather than crush. He disabled two of them before he stopped seeing stars. Dislocating shoulders and breaking wrists by twisting their armor.

  Exodus flew into the middle of the squad, a trio of swords floating in the air behind him. He speared one of the still-armed and blindly swinging knights. Once impaled, the light bender compressed the spear he made into a ball and detonated it inside of the beast.

  Magneto flew passed the crusader as he and his swords started in on the other beast-men. Then the mutant leader frowned as he felt a metal near him intermittent. Which should be impossible, unless the metal was already magnetized or charged.

  “You dare defy the High Evolutionary!” A digitized voice shouted.

  A stream of electricity was shot towards Magneto, having already faced the X-man Storm over the years; he was ready for this tactic, as he coated his chest in a magnetic field. So when the bolt struck him his fields guided and shifted the energy safely down and out of his body.

  “I was thinking about it.” The mutant leader replied.

  Magneto reached out and tried to restrain the armored man, but his fields were being rebuffed by the already energized metals. Then the red-suited man started to expand and grow. This madman had originally been a touch shorter than him, but in only a few seconds the man was easily half again taller than him, and he didn't seem to be stopping any time soon.

  So the mutant reached out seized some of the fallen bdes from defeated knights and whipped them towards the still growing man. When they hit him, they didn’t pierce his armor, but they still seemed to distract him, as he stopped growing and fired another bolt of energy at him.

  Magneto repeated what he did to the first bolt, but this one had more kick to it, so he felt the leftover heat and the singeing it left in his bicep.

  “My work is too important to be stopped.” the madman screamed, clearly not noticing that his improved bolt had actually done something to him this time.

  A door behind the giant busted down as a knight fell through it. On the other side, Magneto could see Psylocke was dueling a pair of knights at the same time. Her psychic butterfly fpped away as she parried two men at the same time.

  Then mid-swing her psychic sword shifted into a kama, and she buried the farming tool into one of the knight's neck, causing the paralyzed wolf to drop to his knees. She then used his body to backflip and nd her heel into the eye of the other knight, before she gutted him on her short sword.

  All the while the mutant leader threw wave after wave of steel debris at the giant. The real game changer was when three bolts of light bsted the madman’s leg and knee. As they hit, Magneto could clearly feel the metal underneath.

  “Keep it up Exodus, do it enough and I can peel his armor off of him.” He told his comrade.

  Exodus took to the air, the swords followed him, and he fired off volley after volley, and Magneto could feel more and more of the giant's suit.

  However, before victory could be seized, the giant shouted defiance. “I Will Not Be Stopped!” before his rge body released a yellow and green mist, as he quickly shrank back down to normal size. The fog he generated covered much of the already rge room, blinding the two mutants.

  Yet Magneto still semi-felt the man through his powers, as the intermittent metal suddenly flew straight up. As if the man could somehow fly like he and Exodus could. So the leader chased after the man recklessly through the fog.

  As he flew through the mist, Magneto’s skin and face started to tingle. ‘I really hope Nath’aniel can reverse whatever this stuff is doing to me.’ He thought as he pressed on.

  Once he was clear of the fog, he could see a rocket pack built into the red suit the High Evolutionary wore. The fme suddenly cut off, and Magneto thought that they might have him, but the worse two things happened. First, the ship beside him started to rumble and shake, and two pairs of arms reached out and dragged his quarry into said ship.

  Worried that they might get away, Magneto gave up his pursuit and instead started to weave a field on the ship, but he wasn't fast enough, as before he could wrap even half of one of the ship floors in a field, it shot up into the air.

  Attached to the ship via his field, he went with it. He knew he couldn't breathe in space, so he sacrificed all of his already established defensive fields to get a full field around the ship. Too little effect, but with one established, he quickly added another, and another. As the ship and he got further up in the air.

  With the third, the ship jerked and slowed a little. He felt rather than saw the navigation wings extend from the ship, so adding the fourth took some effort from him. A drop of blood dripped out of his nose, as he started his fifth field. Magneto started to worry that this was going to be the end for him.

  However, luck finally swung his way, as when the ship hit the magenta sphere he was empowered. Three times better than any shot of adrenaline he had received in his long life. It was better than any drug. He felt renewed in the energy.

  The fifth and sixth yers were wrapped around the ship in the blink of an eye, while he stayed in the magenta sphere the ship got a touch further away, but at the eighth yer, Magneto felt he was like he the first time he took his son fishing. He knew he had them now.

  ‘I got you.’ He thought the air too thin to risk speaking.

  He felt something else extend from the ship, he couldn’t see it. ‘Perhaps they are just despite and are trying anything to interfere.’ The mutant thought. As he wrapped a ninth yer of magnetic energy around the ship and started to pull it back to him.

  The extended piece was not as big as the fins, but he frowned when he felt it slip away from the ship, as only the test three fields were affecting it, and a handful of seconds ter the thing shot away completely.

  ‘A shuttle.’ He realized too te, and half screamed “no”, but trying to almost made him bck out and lose the ship entirely. So he shut his mouth and through sheer willpower pulled the ship back, in his anger he started to bend and crush the thing. The fins were completely curled and crushed, and most of the outer pnels were dented.

  Then the engines shut off, and a speaker in the hull spoke at him. “We surrender, please do not kill us. Please, most of our people are in here, please have mercy.” The message repeated twice more, but Magneto wasn’t listening.

  Instead, he was hearing the words from Nath'aniel. ‘I abhor genocide in all its forms.'

  He was thinking about how close he was to not only killing them all, but also himself. 'And for what?' he wondered. Then as the ck of oxygen started to affect his vision, he tugged on the no longer struggling ship and the two of them slowly fell back down to Earth.

  He purposely took it slow on the way back, so that he could catch his breath. He had to be strong when he arrived. He had to show to the others that he was better than he was. Not because he had to be strong for his Brotherhood, but because he was so close to doing something that might have ruined his friendship with the mage.

  DLRhanna