"Don't worry about me ..." Hank gasped, ever the comedian. "I'll be fine, really.. .just give me a moment... to catch my breath____”
His opponents didn't seem to appreciate his attempt at humor. They kept on coming, their hands balled and ready to bludgeon, their faces all set in the same grim, twisted way.
Hank recognized the expression, though it had been years since he saw it last. Lucifer, he thought, with a twinge of revulsion.
Gathering what was left of his strength, he did the last thing his enemies would have expected of him-he launched himself into their midst and hit them with everything he had, hands and feet lashing and striking. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough.
The Quistalian's puppets unleashed a storm of cold, silent fury on him, landing blow after bone-rattling blow. Hank endured it for as long as he could. Then he began to feel consciousness slip away like water draining through a sieve.
"You know," he muttered through the haze of his pain, "I'm beginning to think ... you don't like me ..."
And just like that, the beating stopped.
Hank looked up through the battered flesh around his eyes, scarcely daring to believe Lucifer's soldiers might be done with him. Then he saw why the energy pawns had discontinued their bombardment.
They had their hands full with something else at the moment-something that had them clutching their heads and swearing as if a pack of demons had taken residence in their skulls.
Hank had seen people do that before... under the
impact of a massive psionic assault. And to his knowledge, there was only one being capable of executing such an assault, in this dimension or any other.
Professor Xavier.
But the professor was in the Nameless Dimension, incapable of lending a helping hand-or so Hank had believed. Now he wondered ... what if one of his teammates had activated the Quistalian apparatus and enabled Xavier to escape his dimensional prison?
With an effort, Hank rolled over onto all fours and tried to catch a glimpse of his mentor. And he was rewarded with a sight he had feared he might never see again.
That of a single-minded Charles Xavier dragging himself onto the crest of an overhanging rock, hurling bolt after psionic bolt at Lucifer's henchmen like an avenging angel.
But Lucifer's puppets weren’t ready to fall just yet.
Fortified by the ionic energy that allowed them to topple trees and X-Men alike, they withstood the professor’s mental barrage. Then, grimacing with the pain it must have cost them, they fired back at Xavier with the same formidable level of intensity.
The professor was shaken by the first blinding bolt that hit him, but he managed to remain upright nevertheless. The second bolt had more impact, doubling him over. But it was the third blast, from the fingertips of the baby-faced blond man, that laid Xavier out like a dead man.
No! Hank cried in the recesses of his mind.
And in those same recesses, he felt the touch of a familiar, comforting presence, silently assuring him that what was real and what he had seen were two very different things.
Of course, the X-Man thought. If I hadn't been so groggy, I would have figured it out for myself.
Xavier hadn't fallen at all. Hank knew that now. It was just an illusion forged in the professor's mind, designed to encourage Lucifer's soldiers to drop their defenses.
As the baby-faced man climbed the rock to inspect his victim's inert form, the real Xavier peeked out from behind a tree. However, neither the babyfaced man nor any of the Quistalian's other lackeys seemed to catch sight of him-another result of the professor's ability to create believable illusions.
Hank sent out a thought in the hope that his mentor would pick it up. I can help, sir.
No need, came the reply.
And indeed, there wasn't any. As Hank looked on, Lucifer's pawns twitched as if a charge of electricity had suddenly ravaged their nervous systems. Then they crumpled to the ground, and the mutant got the impression that they wouldn't be getting up anytime soon.
A moment later, the illusory professor faded from view. That left only one Xavier on the mountainside-the genuine article.
Hank grinned at him as he ascended to Xavier's level. "Welcome back, Professor.”
Xavier didn't return the grin, but his features softened a bit. "Thank you," he said softly. "It is good to be back."
I'm sure it is, Hank thought.
Ignoring his exquisite collection of bumps and bruises, he picked the professor up in his arms and went looking for the rest of team.
Floating in the air, Charles Xavier considered the dark, oily-looking apparatus that had freed him from the endless tedium of the Nameless Dimension.
The professor felt an irrational pang of gratitude to the device, which had already been disconnected from its
Quistalian power source. But it wasn't so overwhelming a pang that it prevented Xavier from giving the command he needed to give.
"Destroy it," he said.
Scott, who still had a bad bruise and a headache to show for his collision with Bobby, didn't hesitate for even a moment. He opened his visor and released a blood-red optical blast at the device, bathing himself and his teammates in the beam's reflected glare.
For a moment, the machine held together, even under the considerable force of Scott's assault-evidence of the care and skill with which Hank had put it together. Then it shattered into what seemed like a thousand individual components, ruined beyond any hope of repair.
And with it went Lucifer's hopes of escaping his exile.
"Good riddance," said Bobby, as Scott closed his visor again. “To tell you the truth, that thing gave me the creeps."
"Though it performed its purpose,” Hank reminded him.
"It did at that,” said Jean. She glanced at the professor who was held aloft by her power. "I don't imagine Lucifer was very happy about losing his shot at freedom."
Xavier recalled the gloved hand that had forced its way up through the transdimensional gateway, only to be sucked back into it at the last possible moment. "Probably not," he replied dryly.
"Or with what the professor did to his henchmen," Scott added.
Xavier shrugged. "I merely took advantage of the fact that they were human beings at their core-and not the sort of pure-energy agents with which Lucifer had recently plagued us."
It was true. If the Quistalian's lackeys had been made entirely of ionic energy, like the doppelgangers or the pair
SUMS IF IDE PIS!
who had accosted the professor and Bobby on the road, he might not have been able to stop them.
But Lucifer's assault force had been made up of everyday people-people imbued with immense power, to be sure, but people nonetheless. And because they were biological entities with brains and nervous systems, they had been vulnerable to the professor's potent mental bolts.
"And, speaking of Lucifer's agents..Xavier said, allowing his voice to trail off meaningfully.
All twelve of them were still lying outside on the mountain, blissfully unconscious. The professor had cut them off from the Quistalian's influence and power when he assaulted their brains, so they no longer posed any kind of threat in that regard.
However, they had seen Xavier in action and learned the location of the alien facility. Something had to be done about that. And in the professor's opinion, he was just the man to do it.
He looked at Jeffrey, who was standing apart from the mutants, near the doorway that led from the smaller chamber into the larger one. The young man looked very much out of place in the alien chamber, with its dark, serpentine patterns and its eerie lighting.
'‘Come," Xavier told him, all too familiar with Jeffrey's understandable insecurities. "We still have some work to do."
With that, Jean took Jeffrey's hand and gently led him out of the room. Xavier followed, still buoyed by the power of Jean's mind, and the rest of his X-Men came after him.
Outside the confines of the corridor, in the open, pine-scented air, dark clouds had- beg
un to gather in the east. There was a smell of ozone in’the air, presaging rain.
Using a stud on the side of the key that Scott had gotten from the doppelganger, the X-Men resurrected the metal
MEI
slab that separated the facility from the rest of the world. Then Hank covered the spot with an ample supply of pine needles to keep hikers from stumbling on it.
The professor considered Lucifer's energy-fueled pawns, scattered in various, awkward poses among the trees. His brief contact with their minds had revealed that each of them had done something heinous in his life-something that had given the Quistalian access to their psyches in a way Xavier didn't quite understand.
The professor wished he could erase whatever it was in these individuals that had caused them to do these things. He wished he could cleanse them, transform them, redeem them. But he wasn't God. It wasn’t his place to remake men in his own image.
On the other hand, Lucifer had already changed them-and Xavier felt eminently justified in undoing what the Quistalian had already done. Besides, he needed to make sure these twelve posed no further threat.
So he entered their minds again, one by one, and relieved them of all their most recent memories. He scoured out all knowledge of Lucifer, the power they had wielded and the alien facility they had stormed. And he made them forget they had ever seen the X-Men or a Professor Charles Xavier, much less battled them on a mountainside.
Next, Xavier roused them from their slumber, brought them to their feet and opened their eyes-though he didn't yet restore their ability to interpret what they saw. Then he sent them on their way, making them look like simple sleepwalkers as they descended the slope.
They would continue that way, unseeing and unknowing, until they reached the road that had brought them to the mountain. Only then would the professor truly awaken them and leave them to their own devices.
"I don't get it," said Bobby. "Why didn't Lucifer send some of his ionic-energy constructs after us instead?"
"No doubt," Xavier told his protege, “because his ability to generate and direct such entities was not unlimited. Lucifer must have believed that twelve amplified human beings would be more effective against you than two or three pure-energy warriors."
“They were effective," Jean noted. She turned to the professor. “Until you made it back to Earth.”
"Indeed,” said Xavier, "that altered the equation. Had my participation in the conflict been a consideration from the beginning, Lucifer's strategy might have been different. But I was in the Nameless Dimension, where he didn't think I would become a factor.”
“Good thing for us," said Bobby, "that you did become a factor."
"There is only one more task ahead of us," the professor noted.
Hank nodded. "Let's go get Warren.”
Unfortunately, they no longer had the winged energy duplicate to transport them across the valley to the Blackbird. However, they still had Bobby Drake's Ice Express.
As Bobby created a narrow ice slide for them-one that would melt long before anyone noticed it and had reason to become curious about it—Xavier hoped fervently that Warren was all right. He hoped that the winged man had survived, despite Lucifer's predictions to the contrary.
Judging from the solemn expressions on the faces of his X-Men, the professor was hardly alone in that regard.
s a mutant, Warren Worthington was capable of withstanding the wind-whipped cold of high altitudes. Otherwise, he would have frozen to death a long time ago.
Shivering in the feathered wings he had folded around himself, he gazed across the Quistalian chamber at the mouth of the corridor on the other side. It was packed with silver spheres-the same spheres that had overtaken Warren, suffocated him until he lost his grip on his gold and scarlet cylinder, and gradually forced him back from the facility's exit.
But even with his escape route blocked, the mutant hadn't given up. He had searched every inch of the towering chamber, especially its lofty ceiling, attempting to find an egress that wouldn't lead him into the hostile embrace of the silver globules.
And he had failed.
The one benefit Warren had realized from all his activity was a temporary increase in his body heat. But without food or water, there was no way he could have kept it up.
MEI
Little by little, he had been forced to slow down, then to stop flying altogether. And that was when the cold began to seep into his bones, reminding him that he was in a sub-zero environment.
Warren knew he was in desperate need of heat-even a little. If there were active machines in the facility, he reasoned, they had to have a power source. And even the most efficient power source was liable to give off a little thermal radiation.
With that logic in mind, he had examined the floor and walls of the chamber, hoping to find a warm spot. And after a long, painstaking hunt, he had found one-directly in front of the cylinder array.
It wasn't exactly balmy there, but it was an improvement over the surface around it. Hunkering down, Warren had tucked his hands into his armpits and brought his wings in close and tried to conserve what little remained of his body heat.
For a while, as he sat there on his haunches, he had nurtured the hope that his teammates would find a way to rescue him. But as seconds had stretched into minutes and minutes into hours, that hope had dwindled.
Worse, Warren had come to wonder if his comrades might have perished-because nothing short of death would have prevented them from finding a way to free him. And that thought, more than his own dim prospects for survival, had been the most difficult burden for him of all.
Suddenly, there was a thought in his brain: Warren?
He looked around, his muscles painfully stiff, his mind thick and sluggish from what he had been forced to endure. Who... ?
And then he answered his own question. Professor
Xavier. Who else? But... wasn't he imprisoned in the Nameless Dimension? And if he was, how was he communicating with Warren?
Unless it wasn't the professor at all, the mutant thought. Maybe he was getting hypothermic and suffering delusions. Or even worse, maybe it was Lucifer in his head, only pretending to be Professor Xavier.
It's not Lucifer, the voice assured him. It's me. And I’m no longer imprisoned in the Nameless Dimension.
It couldn't hurt to play along, Warren told himself, his arms and legs beginning to cramp. It wasn't as if his situation could get any worse.
“All right,’’ he said out loud, his voice echoing madly in the chamber. "It's you. What you want from me?"
A moment later, he saw something happen to the air in front of him. It seemed to coalesce, to take on a filmy, gray substance. Warren had seen its like before. It was an astral projection.
And sure enough, the face that seemed to float near the top of the ghostly image was that of Professor Xavier. But that didn't mean much to the winged mutant at the moment. As far as he knew, Lucifer was capable of pulling the same trick.
The projection looked around. Then it turned back to Warren, I don't want anything at all from you. Just hang on as best you can. It paused for a full second. I think I know now what to do.
And with that, it seemed to fall through the floor until it had faded entirely from view.
Warren frowned, trying to figure out what Lucifer might have hoped to gain from such a trick. Was he raising the X-Man's hopes, only to dash them a few moments later? Was
HER
he torturing his last, remaining victim while he still had the chance?
Or, the mutant wondered as his shivering got worse, was it possible he had received a visit from the real Professor X?
Warren just hoped he would live long enough to find out.
Scott Summers, who was waiting with his teammates on the brink of the frozen crevasse, hadn't expected Professor Xavier to take any more than thirty seconds to investigate Warren's situation. As it turned out, Xavier took less than twenty-five.
"I have a plan," the professor an
nounced suddenly, the light returning to his eyes as he leaned forward in his golden antigrav unit.
Scott listened closely, eager to hear anything that would help them free their teammate.
"Apparently," Xavier continued, "Warren was able to identify a warm spot on the floor-the result of thermal radiation from the facility's power source. It has been a boon to his survival. But it may also prove to be the key to our rescue attempt."
"How so?" asked Hank.
"Taking advantage of my immateriality," said the professor, "I dropped below the level of the floor and took a look at the power generator. Unfortunately, it is buried rather deeply. As a result, it would be difficult to reach and disable in the short period of time Warren has left.
"However," Xavier went on, “the power source's connections to the mechanisms that deploy and guide the globules are significantly more accessible. If we could sever them, it would render the spheres inert. At that point, they would be so much debris."
"But we still need to get into the place to sever the connections," Bobby pointed out.
"True," Xavier conceded. “However, it seems to me that getting in should not be quite as difficult a task as getting out. Warren, after all, was simply shunted back into the main chamber. I believe that would happen to anyone trapped by the globules."
jean nodded. "So all we have to do is crack open Bobby's ice seal and the globules will bring us inside."
"And once we're there," said Hank, “we can clear the way for what should be a blissfully uncontested exit."
“Or we could find out there's a backup system and get trapped in there along with Warren," Bobby noted.
The professor looked at him. “I believe that is a risk we must take if we're to have a chance of recovering Warren."
"Then what are we waiting for?" Hank asked, showing his long, sharp teeth. "Let's go crack Bobby's seal.”
He had already begun to move toward Bobby's slide when Xavier stopped him with a word. "No," the professor said suddenly.
"No?" asked Scott.
Xavier frowned, as if he were mulling something over. “On second thought," he said, "I believe Bobby has a point."
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