Free Web NovelChapter 67: Chapter 67 - Wrong Countermeasures Again
Lady Deathstrike moved first.
The wall at the rear of the estate rose high enough to discourage ordinary men, which made it decorative rather than meaningful. She went over it in one clean motion after the line went up. No wasted effort. No noise beyond the small scrape of contact. On the other side, she landed low on the wet grass and stayed still for half a breath while the rest of the vanguard slid into place behind the cover of the dark.
The sea was off to the right. The mansion sat ahead with too many windows and the sort of wealth that made Stryker angrier on principle. Floodlights stayed off. The grounds looked asleep.
That did not mean they were safe.
Jason came over next under escort, lighter on his feet than she would have expected from somebody carrying that much damage in the head. He stayed close to the wall at first, one hand brushing the stone like he needed the contact to feel the edge of the world properly. Two soldiers followed him, both loaded with suppressed carbines and the professionally miserable expression of men who had already decided this was a bad idea but had come anyway because orders had weight.
Deathstrike touched the throat mic once.
"Rear entry clear."
Stryker’s voice answered in her ear.
"Advance."
She crossed the terrace side first, cutting past trimmed hedges and winter beds without bothering to admire what money had bought. Her claws remained sheathed for now. There would be time for metal later.
Jason moved with her, slower, eyes distant already. He was reaching ahead with the power, feeling for minds, mood, resistance, cracks. Stryker used him like a pry bar wrapped in human skin.
At the outer ring, Ross’s men waited in the dark beyond the grounds. Snipers had windows covered. Containment teams held back until contact. The helicopters stayed low and distant over the black Atlantic line, just close enough to move fast if called and far enough not to announce themselves too early. Ross had arranged a relay all the way west, with six helicopters in sequence, and five swaps at prepared strips. The trip from Long Island to Alkali Lake would cover roughly 1,800 miles. Loaded birds with containment gear and a living prisoner were good for a little over three hundred miles per leg if nobody wanted to die over Ohio. So they would change out in stages, refuel, rearm, and keep moving until the bastard was on a slab.
That was the plan.
Most plans improved on paper.
Deathstrike reached the rear door and paused. Unlocked.
That was wrong.
Jason looked at the handle, then at her, and gave the smallest nod. freewebnovel.cσ๓
Inside.
She pushed through first and entered a kitchen with steel counters, dark stone, quiet appliances and clean lines. Somebody rich lived here now, but not long enough for the rooms to smell fully inhabited. The air carried the scent of sea salt, polished wood, and something else beneath it. Potions, maybe.
They moved room by room.
Soldiers peeled off into the side corridors. Another pair went to the staircase. Jason stayed with her, eyes half unfocused as he searched beyond the visible. He whispered once without looking at anyone.
"He knows we’re here."
Deathstrike did not need that confirmed. She could feel it in the looseness of the house. No panic. No alarms. No servants rushing. No defensive scramble. Just silence arranged too neatly.
In the front sitting room, they found one man.
The butler sat on a chair near the wall with a straight back, folded hands, and the expression of somebody waiting for a delayed train rather than an armed assault team. He looked them over with perfect boredom.
Sebastien, or Benjamin Carter if anybody had still cared about the correct name, had already seen enough of Lucius Noctis to recalibrate what counted as a problem. Men with rifles creeping through a mansion at night felt almost quaint by comparison.
He looked at the woman in black first, then the odd young man with empty eyes, then the soldiers behind them.
He did not rise.
That annoyed one of the troops instantly.
"Hands where I can see them."
Benjamin lifted both hands an inch off his lap out of politeness rather than fear.
The soldier stared at him.
Deathstrike did not waste time.
"Where is he?"
Benjamin’s eyes moved to her face, then to the aggression suggested by her posture, and then past all of them towards the terrace doors.
He thought, with the dead calm of a man who had recently been leased by a hotel to a monster, that none of these people really had any idea what sort of evening they had chosen. It was almost unfair.
"Outside," he said. "He’s waiting."
One of the soldiers swore quietly.
Jason smiled.
"Good."
Benjamin looked from one to the other and briefly wondered whether any of them could actually take care of Lucius. The answer, in his current estimate, was no. From the looks of the woman, she might manage half a second. The man and the rest would not. He just hoped they would not mess the carpets with blood.
He folded his hands again.
"I should mention that this is almost certainly the part where your prospects worsen."
Nobody thanked him for the warning.
Deathstrike led the way through the open terrace doors.
Lucius sat facing the sea as if he had invited the weather over for a private drink. The broad new body fitted the chair badly because the chair had been made for ordinary men, and he no longer seemed interested in being one. Pale blue eyes turned towards the team with immediate amusement.
Behind them, the sea moved. Ahead of them, he smiled.
That irritated Deathstrike before the fight had even started.
Jason stepped forward first. The power came off him cold and sly, a mental net cast towards Lucius’s mind with all the ugly force of a damaged boy trying to make the world stop resisting.
Lucius did not bother rising at once.
Instead, he let Jason believe he had found purchase.
The illusion went straight into Lucius’s mind the way Jason intended. From Jason’s side, it was clean work. He fed Lucius false positions, a warped sense of depth, and the image of Deathstrike splitting into several advancing figures so that the real attack would come buried inside doubt and bad angle.
Jason leaned a fraction towards Deathstrike and spoke in a low whisper without taking his eyes off Lucius.
"He sees you in three places. Left, right, and centre. He thinks the terrace edge is closer than it is. Go for the real line."
Lucius caught every plan and intention by reading it out of Jason’s and the rest of the so-called invaders’ minds before the whisper had even finished leaving his mouth.
That made the performance easy.
He let his gaze move between the false Deathstrikes exactly the way Jason expected. He let his focus drag once towards the wrong edge of the terrace. He even delayed his first movement by the right fraction so the little telepath could feel successful.
Jason’s face tightened with the effort and then with vindicated confidence.
"He’s resisting," he murmured, "but I have him."
Lucius rose at last; he did not attempt to reveal how easily he could have torn the whole thing apart.
"Resisting?" His tone was mild and almost offended. "That sounds so hostile."
Deathstrike moved.
She went for him through the visual confusion with the kind of commitment only professionals and lunatics brought to close violence. Her claws came out. Jason pushed harder at the same time, flooding Lucius with enough false positioning and depth distortion to make every line of sight uncertain except the one he wanted him to trust.
A tranquiliser round struck empty air where Lucius had appeared to be half a second earlier. Another soldier flinched at a chair that seemed to sit a foot left of where it actually was. One of the men at the rear clipped the doorframe on his own entry as Lucius was playing with their senses. They were going to blame the junior Stryker anyway.
Lucius let the whole thing play.
Deathstrike got close once, twice, then a third time. On the third pass, he caught her wrist with one hand, glanced down at the claws, and let actual irritation show.
"Those are tacky."
He could have broken her there.
Instead, he shoved her back just hard enough to keep the struggle credible. Jason hit him again with the full weight of the illusion and drove a spike of psychic pressure behind it. Lucius deliberately let his posture slacken by degrees. One soldier got the carbon-fibre restraints around his wrists. Another caught his shoulders from behind. Deathstrike came in low and drove him off balance.
He allowed the whole thing.
By the time they forced him to one knee, he had already reached through the nearest minds, found their command loops, and started laying soft hands over all of them.
One of Ross’s men stepped in with the collar case at Stryker’s order. Deathstrike held Lucius in place while the soldier snapped it shut around his neck. It locked with a hard metallic click and a low-powered hum, the control lights on the side turning steady green.
Lucius noticed Mystique’s ability was fading, so he put on an illusion that let them see his new height and body.
Jason looked openly relieved when he saw it.
"Good," he said. "Keep that on him."
"Bring in Leech," he continued. Then he looked at the collar and added, because fear still had more say in him than confidence, "And keep the collar on him."
That was the signal Stryker had been waiting for.
At the remote command point, the live feeds from Jason, Deathstrike, Leech’s handlers, and the soldiers all showed the same prize at once.
Ross leaned in towards the screen.
"Do not mess this up."
Stryker smiled with satisfaction.
"He’s ours."
-
On the terrace, Benjamin watched the team drag Lucius upright in restraints and had the very strong feeling one should get before storms or funerals.
He was pretty sure Noctis had his own plans. The frustrating sociopath had made the director of SHIELD come to his feet to take back an assassin spy. Mr Stark was visiting regularly as well. Thus, he was pretty sure these people were in a mess way above their paychecks.
-
Leech was brought forward under escort, small and unhappy and carrying his power like a dead patch in the world. The moment the boy was in place, Jason gave another order for the handlers to keep him close through the whole transfer, no matter how secure the collar looked. The moment he entered the proper range, the newer mutant body Lucius wore felt the dampening effect. The mutable fluidity of Mystique’s template tightened. The surface ease of reshaping dulled.
The real things, however, the older acquisitions that he had internalised through the Array of Convergence and the powers he had taken from the Eternal duo, remained fully his.
That was the joke. Stryker had brought the wrong answer to the wrong question.
Lucius lowered his head, let his body sag, and acted as if the suppression had hit everything at once. He even let his eyes go slack for effect.
Jason, breathing hard from the effort of the earlier exchange, made the obvious mistake.
"He’s going under."
Deathstrike gave him one hard look.
"He’s pretending."
Jason shook his head.
"No. Leech has him. Move."
She did not believe him completely.
She obeyed anyway.
They hauled Lucius through the house, past the front hall, down the path, and into the waiting helicopter under the wash of the rotors. The collar stayed locked around his throat, heavy enough to look reassuring. Leech was loaded beside him exactly as ordered. Two handlers strapped the boy in and kept him within arm’s reach of the prisoner. Four soldiers took the opposite bench. Deathstrike and Jason remained in the second bird with the command relay because, like any other mutant, they hated to be near the Leech.
The door slammed shut.
The helicopter lifted.
Lucius kept his head down and his breathing slow while his telepathy spread through the cabin and then beyond it to the other birds in the relay, the ground teams, the pilots, the command net, and the men waiting at the first transfer strip.
Ross had indeed arranged a chopper chain with five changes, each leg planned around a practical loaded range and the need to keep one bird always fresh enough to continue west without trusting any single airframe to cross half the continent. The first swap would come after roughly three hundred miles. Then another and another. It was cautious, expensive, and militarily competent in the small-minded way he expected.
None of it mattered.
By the time they reached the first airfield, the soldiers in the operation were already ceasing to belong to Stryker or Ross.
Lucius threaded into them one by one, smoothing over suspicion, nudging the weak points, loosening resistance where exhaustion had already done half the work. The pilot kept glancing at the restrained mutant. The sniper, two birds back, hated enclosed spaces. The handler resenting Leech. The officer was rehearsing the report he would give later. Each mind opened differently. Each one surrendered eventually.
He sat in false unconsciousness and built an army around him in silence.
By the time they crossed into the final leg towards Alkali Lake, every soldier in the operation was his in all the ways that mattered.
Stryker watched the live feeds the whole way.
He saw the handoff at the first strip, the transfer to the second helicopter, the second to the third, and so on across the relay. At each change, the collar stayed on Lucius and Leech was brought in beside him again before the next bird lifted, because Stryker wanted every layer of control he could stack on the bastard. He watched the prisoner stay limp under restraint. He watched Deathstrike’s scepticism flatten into disciplined silence. He watched Leech remain close enough to satisfy the theory. He watched his son’s smug little confidence grow worse with every successful mile.
So when they finally brought him into the Alkali Lake facility and laid him down in the lab like a captured animal, they did it believing the hardest part was over.
The room smelled like cold metal, disinfectant, and old cruelty.
Stryker liked it that way.
They strapped Lucius down onto the slab with the careful force of men handling something they feared more than they understood. The collar remained locked around his neck, its control lights still glowing steady green, and the guards stepped back only when every restraint had been checked thrice.
Deathstrike remained nearby for a minute longer than the others, still not fully satisfied, but Stryker ordered her back to stand by. Jason stood in the background of the control feed with the faint expression of a boy expecting praise he had not earned.
Leech had already been taken to a separate room by his handlers to keep the suppression available without having him in the centre of the lab.
The door shut.
For three seconds, the room stayed exactly as Stryker wanted it.
Then he left an illusion of himself on the slab, limp, unconscious, collared, and obedient to every camera angle in the room.
Lucius disabled the collar with a thought.
The internal current simply died, the lock logic collapsed, and the little military arrogance built into the thing went blind all at once. He lifted one hand, touched the dead metal at his throat, and let Phastos’s gift do what it did best.
The structure opened under his understanding immediately. Layered circuits, redundant charge routing, and suppression emitters tied to a central control spine. It was not elegant, but it was competent in the way frightened governments built competent things, thick, ugly, and proud of its own brutality. Lucius followed the whole design in seconds, from energy flow to command hierarchy to the exact weak points that would make future use amusing.
"Oh, this will cause chaos later."
That pleased him enough that he turned the collar to dust between one breath and the next.
-
He was already floating in a seated posture, invisible, unbothered, and letting his telepathy spread through the facility in widening circles. He mapped the whole place mind by mind while the false body on the slab kept breathing in the slow, docile rhythm Stryker expected.
Lucius looked round the lab with open curiosity and then settled in mid-air to wait.
Stryker would come. Men like him always came for the speech. They needed to stand in front of their prize, explain superiority to a restrained enemy, and hear themselves framed as reasonable by the room.
Lucius intended to let him have that. Later.
First, he decided to be productive.
He teleported out of the lab and into the side room where Leech sat on the floor rocking faintly back and forth.
The boy looked smaller away from the operation, smaller and younger and filthier in the moral sense because the people around him had used him so thoroughly that even his stillness felt conscripted.
Lucius stepped round him once, reading the handlers outside, the lines of access, and the boy’s damaged little rhythm.
Then he etched the sacrificial array around him.
The runes cut fast into the floor under telekinetic guidance, rune after rune closing with quiet precision while Leech remained on the ground inside them, too conditioned and too wronged to react before it was finished.
Lucius stepped to the first rune.
Then he whispered.
"Sacrifice."
