Kaiten: The Last Ones Standing (3/4)
Mar. 17th, 2007 05:19 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
x-cable.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
xp_logsAs Storm's team helps the FBI in New York, another team of X-Men is heading to Mexico. It's going to be a long day.
(OOC: Yes, the log IS in reverse.)
1:38pm
Brimstone. Nathan registered the smell even as he whirled and slammed the flat of his psimitar's blade against the head of the man in front of him. Using his psimitar as a bludgeon. Forge was going to kill him. But he was having a hard enough time staying on his feet, burning through his reserves of energy and concentration at a scary speed. It had taken that much to finally get into the damned house.
They hadn't expected this many. Hadn't been prepared, and while it had been unavoidable, while they'd had to take this chance... we'll be lucky if we all get out of here and can rehash why flying by the seat of your pants is not a good idea.
Kurt was not in good shape, his left hand now all but useless at his side and his face and clothes covered in blood, much of it his. But he was still on his feet and fighting at Nathan's side, kicking with both feet and punching with his good hand. Not to mention occasionally whipping people in the face with his tail.
At this point, Nathan had lost his grip on his teammates' minds entirely. No switchboard, not even the telepathic tags that would at least tell him where they were and their status. He thought he'd sense it if they were in deep trouble, any of them. He hoped. But he couldn't stop to check. Kurt was there, and they were both here, and there was a mind in the room at the end of the hall, one whose acquaintance he was definitely going to make.
Two more Preservers came rushing at him, screaming. One was afire from head to toe; Nathan pivoted, but wasn't fast enough to keep the man from grabbing him. "Race traitor!" the man screamed - or tried to. The telekinetic hammer-blow that slammed into his ribs meant that the epithet was cut off by a choked, bubbling scream. He fell, and Nathan reeled back against the wall, his leathers smoking.
Kurt didn't know as surely as Nathan did about the person at the end of the hall, but these people were trying very hard to keep them away from something. Clearly it was something worth getting to, so he just focused on the door and kept fighting.
They were going to wish they had a medic along as much for their prisoners as for themselves, Nathan thought, even as he broke his other attacker's leg with a telekinetic burst, and slammed the next into the wall head-first. Questions of appropriate force had gone out the window the moment it had become clear how badly they were outnumbered.
Felling those two Preservers created a gap, however, a definite gap, and Nathan flung himself through it and at the door that was just closing. A solid, telekinetically-assisted kick reduced it to splinters.
The backwash sent the man inside flying backwards and to the floor. Only for a moment, though. He was scrambling back to his feet, cursing in a language Nathan didn't know. The face he knew, however. Charles had reinforced the image for him, taken from Jean's mind and Devlin's mind both.
"You," Nathan growled at the Preservers' bombmaker, "are coming with us, you son of a bitch." There was someone rushing at him from behind who wasn't Kurt, and Nathan spun and knocked the man off his feet, then smashed the two who followed to the ground.
*Bamf!* "Right now", Kurt confirmed, pacing forward towards the man with a distinctly demonic grin on his face. The blood almost certainly didn't help. "I hope you enjoy teleporting." With no more warning than that, he reached out to seize the bombmaker's arm, and looked round for Nathan to make contact.
In a flash, they were back in the Blackbird's damaged cabin. Nathan staggered, disoriented, and lost his telekinetic grip on the man. Jinasena, strangely, seemed unaffected by the transition. He kicked out at Kurt's knee savagely, even as he wrenched his arm out of his grasp.
Kurt wasn't at the top of his game, for obvious reasons, and didn't manage to dodge the kick in time. He stumbled and fell, biting back a cry of pain.
Jinasena growled and rushed him, hands outstretched. If the fight had been happening in slow motion, both Nathan and Kurt would have been able to see light sparkling between the ends of his fingers. Ominous light, all things considered. As it was, Nathan sensed the man's thoughts shift purposefully, and conscious thought deserted him, swamped by a tidal wave of pure denial. He intercepted the bombmaker in a move that wouldn't have seemed out of place on a hockey rink. The bodycheck slammed Jinasena to the Blackbird's deck.
Kurt pushed himself painfully to his feet and then, with his good leg, kicked Jinasena in the head, hard and precisely placed to knock him out.
It had precisely the desired effect.
Bracing himself on his psimitar, breathing hard, Nathan forced himself to straighten. He met Kurt's eyes, nodding jerkily, and then lowered his shields and projected on a wide band.
#Check in, everyone. We've got the bombmaker.#
---
1:26pm
Marie’s brown eyes seemed to have grown darker as she rose above the burning pine trees, scanning the horizon. Her eyes narrowed as she finally spotted her quarry and the speed at which she dove out of the sky may have even impressed Pietro. “Are you trying to leave the party without a goodbye kiss?” she called out as she swooped down to grab the shirt of the nearest Preserver, legs lashing out to strike as many of the ones standing near him as she could.
The Preservers didn't seem at all taken aback by the arrival of a clearly angry young woman determined to put 'bowling for terrorists' into practice. They were well-trained and well-disciplined, and although some of them were knocked down, others were already retreating, putting a little distance between themselves and her. Those with long-range powers were turning to strike even as they did, and Marie found herself at the center of an impromptu mass shooting gallery, energy blasts of various sorts coming at her. One man ripped a tree up by the roots and tried to use it as a very large equivalent of a baseball bat.
Marie looked down at the various colors exploding across her body, various chunks of her already torn uniform disintegrating as the blasts were stopped by her impenetrable skin. “That was dumb,” she spat out, grabbing the end of the tree that was swung at her and spinning it around to knock aside some of the Preservers who hadn’t retreated far enough away. The man who’d originally ripped it from the ground dangled from the edge even as she threw it crashing into the woods.
Just when it looked like Marie was going to clear the rest of the impromptu battlefield all by herself, a slender dark-haired woman who'd barely missed being knocked flying by the tree stopped short, turning around to face Marie. A wave of nausea and vertigo swept over the X-Man, all at once. Marie buckled over, cursing loudly as she felt her stomach seize up and the world spun around her. "Coward," she managed to squeeze out.
A couple of the energy projectors seemed to decide in unison to seize upon the opportunity. They hammered her with shot after shot, with the clear intention of knocking her out of the sky.
Marie steeled her mind against the waves racking her body. As the shots hammered against her, she swayed through the sky, seemingly haphazardly until she crashed into the forest.
"She's down!" she heard someone say triumphantly. And then there were several of them rushing her, clearly intending to finish her off.
She waited until they were almost on her before letting a grin spread across her face as her foot lashed, the snap of the dark haired woman's leg ringing through the forest. Her fist smashed into another Preserver's face, blood gushing from his broken nose as he stumbled away from her. "What, now y'all wanna leave?" Marie said with a pout. "Ah was just starting to have fun."
---
1:20pm
Protect the plane, Kurt had ordered her. Nathan had rather unnecessarily reinforced the order, saying something about all of this being for nothing if they didn't have a ride back out of here as he'd flung himself out the hatch. Despite the other X-Men having engaged the Preservers in the trees, the plane was still drawing what seemed like more than its share of attention. A plasma blast washed against the hull, not punching through but leaving a significant scorch mark.
Watch the plane. Terry wasn't sure whether it was a concession to the fact that she was the youngest and least experienced or in spite of that. She screamed shortly at the plasma hurler and smiled in grim satisfaction when the sonic lance knocked him off his feet and into the treeline. Drawing breath hurt, the control required over her stomach muscles hurt even more. But that didn't show.
There was another explosion in the forest. A sizeable portion of it seemed to be burning already - it had gone up a few minutes ago in strange, green-blue flames. None of the X-Men were checking in over the coms, although Rogue was visible in the air, on-and-off. Before Terry could try and raise her teammates, two more Preservers were rushing the plane. One was coming straight at her, while the other came from behind, over the top of the plane in an enormous leap.
Terry held her breath, watching them and biding her time. Sound moved at a steady 761 miles per hour and since neither were a speedster, that meant she had plenty of time to bide. The one running at her didn't move any more quickly or gracefully than normal. He was definitely trying to get close--Terry preferred to not let him. The other landed with a mere bending of the knees, hand just skimming the ground. They were far enough apart that a lance wouldn't have the force to stop them and the sound would be merely painful not ear drum shattering.
So Terry's scream was not simply loud, nor was it designed to destroy--though the turf around her feet took quite the beating. It was hard and dissonant with a vibration that rattled bone and turned the stomach. Drop, you bastards, she thought viciously.
They did. Before she could enjoy her success, there was lightning, or what looked like it, coming at her out of the trees. Crackling bolts of energy slashed at her, one right after the other, and it was only the distance between her and the unseen mutant that saved her in that first moment - the bolts seemed less precise as they traveled over greater distance.
Even so she had to throw her bruised and battered body to the side, away from where the last two terrorists were vomiting from the induced nausea. A short imprecise scream in the direction of the lightning was meant more for distraction than anything--it would be too diffuse to harm him, even though the force behind it was deadly.
The lightning thrower darted forward out of the trees, making a complex gesture with his hands that formed a ball of dancing fire. He flung it outwards - not at Terry, but at the already-damaged wing of the Blackbird.
"Bastard!" the word exploded out of her before she could help it and she whirled, her keen hitting the Blackbird, a broad wave of sound shoving it back, the bottom scraping along the ground. The fireball scorched her skin, so close was it but it missed the 'Bird. She stopped and hissed her displeasure, rising to one knee. Drawing a breath, she focused her voice tightly and the sonic blast was sharp and piercing. It was a sound that could have shattered glass even without the power of her voice behind it. Aimed at a person, it would be devastating.
It certainly dropped the other mutant, shattering his eardrums instantly as he fell. For a moment, everything was still - at least in the immediate vicinity of the Blackbird. It was a short respite however. This time, it was gunfire coming at her from out of the woods. Two different directions.
A tiny weary part of her brain protested the gunfire--they were mutants for the love of God. Terry didn't dwell on it, drawing in a deep breath, staying low to the ground. She had three mutants already piled up around her, this was getting completely out of hand. She felt the scream tear out of her throat without regard for control or restraint. The sound wave rippled over the open field and hit the treeline with an enormous cracking of wood as the trunks splintered. If there was more gunfire, if there were screams, she couldn't hear it--only her voice and the forest.
Terry sent up a prayer that the others weren't having this much trouble.
--
1:12pm
Logan leaned against a nearby pine tree, trying to catch his breath. His right hand was smeared in red and was pressed to his abdomen, trying to hold his intestines in while his healing factor rebuilt his abdominal wall. "Gotta take that house up there." he panted to his companion. If he had to take it using only his eyelids, he would.
"No shit," Nathan said, or started to say. An energy blast sliced out of the forest at them, and although it slammed into his TK shield, it sent him staggering backwards and to his knees in the mud. The shield tried to fray around the edges, to crack. Nathan didn't let it. There was a flare of light in the forest ahead of them, and another hammer-blow of white fire against his shield. Nathan growled under his breath and started to reach out telepathically, seeking the mind of his attacker.
Logan pulled himself away from the tree and, left hand out with claws extended, advanced towards where that blast came from. His stealth left something to be desired as he took a blast full in the chest, throwing him backwards into another tree, which splintered with the impact.
Well, at least he bought me an opening. Nathan snarled and pulled himself back to his feet, lashing out telekinetically at the source of the blast - and feeling bones break at the impact. The Preserver was flung backwards into the dead leaves, and Nathan left the ground in a telekinetically-assisted leap, heading for the treetops. #Wolverine!# he projected - this had all been too fast to set up the switchboard, but he could find the other X-Man's mind easily. #Get up!#
Logan kipped back to his feet, steadfastly ignoring the tearing sensation from inside his gut. Without saying a word, he made an Army hand-motion that translated into "Keep moving!" He advanced, using the trees for cover and once again holding his guts in. His superficial injuries were going unhealed for the time being.
They ought to have left Logan in the 'Bird. Not that he would have stayed. Nathan leapt from treetop to treetop, headed unerringly in the direction of the house, farther up the slope of the mountain - until something, or rather someone blurred through the air at him. Too fast. The impact stunned him, and he and the Preserver came crashing down through the trees for a hard landing. He landed on one shoulder, nearly blacking out from the pain.
Despite his daze, he felt a fist slam into his face - once, twice, and then again. But Logan was on Nate's attacker in a flash, claws flashing out to disable, to injure. Blood splashed crimson in the muted sunlight as the claws bit deep.
The Preserver screamed. Nathan groaned and used the arm that still worked, slamming a telekinetically-enhanced punch into the man's jaw. It knocked him cold, and at least halfway off Nathan, which was helpful. Nathan pushed him the rest of the way off, hauling himself back to his feet. His shoulder was obviously dislocated, and, breathing hard, he paused for a moment, slamming it into a tree to put it back into place.
Logan grinned at Nate's grunt of pain and the sick grinding sound as his shoulder popped back into its socket. Logan paused for a moment to let his healing factor work its magic, put things back together. Standing upright, he took an experimental deep breath. Yep, still hurt like a bitch, but it felt like he was getting some lung capacity back. That was good. He grinned again to Nathan and then loped off through the trees, far more agile and quick this time.
Nathan followed, more slowly. They hadn't gone a hundred meters when seemingly the whole forest caught fire around them.
---
1:03pm
They had to take out those energy-projectors. That much was a given; they were pinned down, and the long-range attacks, especially when they were coming from two directions, were going to finish the job that they started unless they took them out right the hell now.
There was no time to strategize for more than a moment. Nathan had located targets for teammates before, even under strenuous circumstances, and that was what he did now, projecting the locations of the two energy-projectors to Kurt and Pietro. It took only a moment, and that was a good thing, because there was incoming fire again almost instantaneously.
Kurt might be injured, but he was still able to fight. He sent back a quick assent and teleported to the treetop platform Nathan had shown him.
There had been more than one person on that platform, of course; Nathan had shown Kurt as much, but it wasn't as if they had much of a choice. The incoming fire had to stop, one way or the other. The problem was, the energy-projector kept blasting away grimly at his target, and the other two mutants on the platform turned their attention to Kurt.
Both were faster and stronger than the norm; one was nearly as agile as Kurt himself. They both launched themselves at him as soon as he appeared, as if competely unaffected by the surprise of having an opponent suddenly there in close quarters. The other who was a touch slower than the other abruptly demonstrated why, as his skin shimmered and changed color and texture, turning from flesh to something greenish and shiny and far, far harder.
They were fast, but so was he, and neither of them could teleport. Using the advantages he had, Kurt launched into a flurry of kicks at his opponents, bouncing from one side of the platform to the other and counting on his clouds of sulphur to serve as one more point in his favour. If he could just get past them to the energy projector...
A short distance off, Pietro closed in on the other energy projector. A column of fire pouring toward the Blackbird made for an incredibly obvious target, and Pietro allowed himself a tiny smile--only three of them? This would be easy.
Then he crossed into what he'd thought was a field of heat-shimmer, and the world went insane. The ground tilted under his feet, and his stomach twisted with nausea, motion sickness he hadn't felt since he was thirteen. Distance was impossible to judge--one minute the three men looked a mile away, the next close enough to touch. He tripped over his own feet and went down, tucking into a roll, and fetched up bruisingly hard against a tree ten feet to the left of the heading he'd thought he was taking.
A slender, dark-haired man stepped out into view. His eyes were locked on Pietro, a fixed, set look of anger on his face. The sensations of nausea intensified sharply.
Well, that one would have to go first. Pietro gathered his feet under him. All he had to do was launch himself through the air in the right direction--his balance wouldn't make much difference to a ballistic trajectory. The trouble was finding the right trajectory.
The other trouble was that he was outnumbered. Pietro's first leap was driven off-course almost immediately by a hammer-blow from the second guard, a man who looked like nothing so much as a Cain Marko who had shrunken in the wash. Pietro rolled to his feet again, swallowed his gorge, and narrowed his eyes. This had suddenly gotten complicated.
One green-armored arm, just there as Kurt teleported back in - a stroke of bad luck, nothing more - slammed him to the ground. The two were on him again, almost immediately. A booted foot slammed into his ribs, and another came down - on his already injured hand.
A grunt at the kick and then he screamed - biting it back almost immediately - as the boot came down on his hand. He couldn't help it - if the bones hadn't been broken before, and they probably had been, he was almost sure they were now. But maybe the luck hadn't been quite as bad as it seemed... with the two attackers focusing on him, the energy projector was undefended. If he could manage one more jump...
As he appeared, upright, behind the energy projector, the man whirled, getting off a blast that would have taken Kurt directly in the chest if he hadn't knocked his arm away. As it was, it smashed through the platform, destroying the supports and sending what was left falling towards the ground.
Kurt could only brace himself for the first instant, then he lunged forward to grab the energy projector's arm. He doubted he could take more than one passenger, in his current state, so the other two would just have to fend for themselves.
Pietro's target seemed to be able to use both hands to create flame. He sent another fireball at the Blackbird, then a smaller one at Pietro, grinning fiercely, amused contempt in his eyes. In fact, he nearly singed the mutant who'd induced the vertigo, causing the younger man to jump aside with a yelp.
Well-trained, the Preserver recovered almost instantly. His attention was split for only a moment. Of course, to Pietro, "almost instantly" and "only a moment" might as well be a wide-open door with an engraved invitation . . .
He sprang forward, jackhammering one fist into the man's solar plexus and bringing the other down on the back of his neck; the Preserver dropped bonelessly. Rolling to the side, he swept the flamethrower's legs out from under him. Pietro struck the man fifteen times before he hit the ground, then rolled to his feet to give the third man a superior smile.
"If you'd like to surrender now, and save me the trouble of carting you back to the plane later, I'll certainly entertain the offer."
The Cain-esque Preserver just growled and set himself into a defensive position, showing a certain basic level of intelligence by not attempting to rush Pietro. "Don't think you're carting me anywhere," he said in an unmistakable Australian accent.
"Well, when you wake up, remember how much easier it could have been." Pietro lunged forward, a quick exploratory punch to test a theory; the other man's head barely rocked back, and Pietro's knuckles felt like he'd punched a brick. Some measure of invulnerability to go with the strength he'd felt when the man hit him, then. Just as he'd thought.
Pietro's next punch, so quickly after the first that his opponent's contemptuous grin was still forming, sounded like a gunshot. So did the next one. And the kick to the back of the strongman's load-bearing knee. He wasn't more than dazed, though Pietro's knuckles felt raw--the man threw out a hand to catch himself, and would have succeeded if Pietro hadn't simply grabbed him by his belt and collar and picked him up.
Seven gees of acceleration was the generally accepted threshold of consciousness for an unprepared human; Pietro gave his burly opponent fifty, just to be sure, looping a half-mile through the trees in just under two seconds. The Preserver's face was slack and pale as they arrived back at their starting point; he'd be out for a few seconds, plenty of time for Pietro to simply . . . let go. Invulnerable skull met thick oak with a crash that was almost lost in the sonic boom from the run-up; the tree cracked and slowly fell, and the Preserver tumbled limp to the ground. Pietro checked his pulse, smiled briefly, and turned to see how the others were faring.
--
12:58pm
Logan's entire world consisted of pain. The piercing, bubbling sensation in his left lung, the ripped flesh up and down his body, the darkness that he couldn't tell was natural or because the blast had taken his eyes - all of these were bad enough. The worst, however, was the freezing bitter cold that came from just to the right of his navel. He tried to make his hands move, to feel the extent of the damage, but the right one erupted in a blaze of pain and the left one slowly, torturously, meandered its way across his torso to the ragged edge of the wound. He felt something warm and slippery, something barely held in check.
"Wolverine!" Rogue screamed out, diving into the wreckage. Logan could heal, but only if there were enough pieces of him left to do so.
Logan heard Rogue scream from someplace far, far away. He was sinking into a languid warmness, feeling his ravaged body slip away from him inch by inch. Frothy bubbles erupted from his mouth as he tried to say something, tried to tell her that his war was done, that Stryker was right, that it was time to put the animal down. But another side of him raged, screaming obscenities into the warm and comfortable darkness. Something that refused to die without a fight. His left hand slid into the jagged wound, questing around the ropes of intestine and the searing, freezing pain to find ... yes. A jagged shard of metal through his kidney. He had to pull it out, had to get rid of it. Somehow.
The flash of movement was enough to catch Rogue's eyes, though if not for the sun glinting on the piece of metal spearing Logan's kidney she might have missed it through the smokey haze. Whizzing through the air, she landed beside him, gloved hands reaching out to gather him in her arms. He looked worse than she'd ever seen and she found her face growing wet as she stared at the broken body she saw in front of her. "Come on Logan...you gotta be ok. Ah need you to be ok."
Logan thought someone might have been talking to him. Someone important. He was moved, and each movement brought a fresh wave of agony to rip and tear at his mind, as his bloody determination. "no" he said, feather-soft, more blood-bubbles bursting into the open air. His fingers, coated in blood, couldn't seem to get any purchase on the metal in his kidney. They scrabbled over the jagged metal, cutting themselves open time and time again, trying to gain some purchase.
Her eyes followed the movement of his hands and her hands quickly followed, grabbing the edge of the metal and pulling. She winced at the squishing wetness of the sound that accompanied it's removal - but she knew that it was the only way he could heal.
Each centimeter that the shard moved brought new, fresh agonies. But once the blade was gone, only the freezing cold remained. His body shiverred, spraying bright red blood-drops hither and yon. From inside the wound, fresh connective tissue sprouted, muscles began to slowly re-knit themselves together, perforations sewed themselves together at a vastly accelerated rate. But for each severed blood vessel that was repaired and restored to function, another one uselessly allowed its precious contents to spill out onto the ground.
Marie gathered him into her arms, rocking back and forth slightly. Everything she knew about first aid didn't apply here so she didn't worry about keeping him stable. Instead, she ran her hands over him looking for more shards where they shouldn't be, removing them to allow the healing process to begin.
There were a distressing number of the Blackbird's hull fragments embedded in Logan's body. The healing process was working, but it was terribly slow. It was basically a race between his ability to heal and Death herself. His uniform was in ribbons, slashed through and through by the cloud of shrapnel. His one eye was ruined, and his other was rolled back as far as it could go into its socket.
"Wake up damn you," Marie muttered, holding him in much the same way he'd held her those years ago. She was careful to avoid his skin against hers, the knowledge that a single touch could aid Death in her ploy for Logan's life. "Come on."
The wound in his abdomen finally started to knit itself closed, the flesh slowly writhing under its own power, blindly seeking to bridge the gap and make him once again whole. His one good eye - the other was still ruined - uncrossed and he blinked some of the sweat and blood out of his eye. "Hey, kid." he rasped in a whisper.
"Hey," she said, tears still streaming from her face. "Don't scare me like that again, 'kay?"
Logan tried for a reassuring smile but wound up with a bloody grimace. "What's going on?" he asked, trying to relax and accept the pain currently flooding his synpases rather than to fight it and thus make things worse.
"Ah…Ah dunno, " Marie said, rubbing her face with a gloved hand and looking up to glance blearily around. Smoke made visibility almost nonexistant and Marie realized how lucky she was to have found Logan so quickly.
A large shape moved towards them, out of the smoke. It was Nathan. "Pull yourselves together if you can," he said roughly. "We're about to have company."
--
12:54pm
"Kurt..." There was nothing like trying to break the instrument panel with one's head. Nathan eased his friend back into the chair, coughing on the smoke that seemed to fill the cabin. "Kurt, come on, wake up-" He could sense Terry and Pietro, and Logan - not in good shape, but there - and Marie, farther off.... and far too many other psi-signatures approaching.
There was blood on Kurt's face when his head flopped back enough to let Nathan see it, from a dozen cuts where the glass had smashed under him, but there didn't appear to be any damage to his eyes, for a blessing. He groaned quietly, stirring on the way to waking up.
"Kurt!" You did not smack the man with a possible head injury. You just didn't. Smacking the concussed was bad. Nathan reached into his mind instead, dragging him back to something approaching full consciousness. "Nightcrawler! We've got incoming, look lively!"
That got through to him as most other things couldn't have, and he sat up and looked around, still groggy but as alert as he was likely to get for the next few minutes at least.
Nathan held onto his shoulder. "Pietro! Terry?" He pieced together the shield around the Blackbird - he'd lost it as the plane had come to a stop, finally - and did it just in time. The damaged plane still shook as multiple energy blasts impacted the shield. "Shit!"
"I'm going to assume that wasn't a direct order," Pietro called back wryly. "I'm fine. I think Siryn got grazed by something, though." Footing had been too unsteady during the actual crash for him to take up another shrapnel collection; still, it niggled at his pride.
"I'm fine," Terry gritted out. "It's nothing serious." She straightened, or tried to, and stopped with a hiss. "Do we have any numbing cream?" Moving, right now, would not be fun. She'd need a bandage too.
Pietro unclipped one of the first aid kits and brought it over. "Can you manage it yourself, and will you be able to fight after? It appears we're about to be entertaining guests."
"Aye, I'll be fine." Terry nodded and unlatched her restraints, shrugging them off her shoulders and managing to sit up straight this time. The leather on her stomach had been cut clean through and a jagged strip of metal was still embedded in her skin. She stared for a second, wondering if she was in shock. Her head felt remarkably clear and a thousand miles distant, "Can you help me with this first? I can wrap it after."
--
12:41pm
"I wonder how things are going in New York," Nathan said quietly. He was sitting in the co-pilot's seat, Kurt beside him actually flying the Blackbird. The other members of the team were behind in the cabin, keyed up in various ways. Having to take off on the fly like this, hoping that this bastard in New York hadn't had the chance to warn anyone at their target that he'd been arrested...
Kurt was focusing on his task, but not so much he couldn't talk to his friend. "We will find out soon enough, I suspect", he said with a faint tense smile. "In any event, at least we know one of their leaders is in custody."
"That's not all that much of a consolation. We need the right one." And he was anxious about Angelo, too, knowing he was caught up in whatever was happening in New York. Part of him wanted to be there. Part of him knew he was more useful here. If they found this bombmaker, they needed to make sure he couldn't do to anyone else what had been done to Scott, and the easiest way to accomplish that was a TK bubble.
And Jean was in Florida, with her husband.
"And we will get him", Kurt offered, trying for absolute confidence. "Today."
Nathan raised an eyebrow at him, cracking an unwilling smile. "The pep talks don't come easily to you, do they?"
"Talking does not always come easily to me", Kurt countered wryly. "Especially in a situation like this."
"You know," Nathan said wryly, his eyes shifting back to the terrain rushing past beneath them, the forested mountains of the Sierra Madre surprisingly misty, for midday, "I can't really say that's a bad thing. Talking is very rarely a good thing, in our job..." He glanced at the console. "Coming up on the coordinates," he said, more business-like. "I'm not so sure where we're going to land..."
"I suppose we will see when we get closer. Hopefully there will be a clear space not too far away but if not... you have me." He thought he could get a good enough look at the place while they flew over.
"All we need is a clearing big enough-" Nathan's voice was a little distant; he was scanning ahead, trying to locate the minds at their target. He didn't see the house he'd seen in Devlin's mind yet. "Get yourselves ready to deploy, folks," he called back over his shoulder. "Coming up on the target."
Terry ceased her pacing and glanced up front, still a little miffed that she wasn't getting to at least co pilot this time. "He couldn't just say 'we're almost here, buckle up'?" she muttered as she took her seat, speaking too softly for anyone but Logan to have caught it. "He makes it sound like we're jumping out of here."
"Shut it, kid." he said, softly enough so that it should only have reached Terry's ears. He then double checked all of his connections. He had the wing-side seat today and the sky was a nice cerulean shade of blue. "Go in ten?" he said up towards the cockpit so that Kurt and Nate could hear him.
"Keep your pants on," was Nathan's irritable response. "We're still looking for an LZ." He was scanning, still. They were out there somewhere, had to be... "They were here when Charles scanned with Cerebro," he muttered. "Surely they can't have cleared out this fast." Scanning from a fast moving plane was screwing with his focus, though.
"Maybe they've got shields," Marie said, breaking the silence she'd held since soon after they'd taken off. "Something they put up after the professor found them?" She refused to accept the idea that they'd moved that quickly. They were catching the bastards today.
"I hope not," Pietro said from where he lounged toward the back of the plane, feet up on one of the empty seats. "If they've cleared out or put shields up, then it's possible they know we're coming, so the mission profile skews a lot more complicated. We can still hope they're only looking for us on radar, I suppose, but if they're able to pick up on Xavier . . ." He shrugged expressively.
"Bad thought," Nathan muttered, but tuned out the others, at that point. If they weren't here, if they'd lost their chance... Out of the corner of his eye, in the same instant that he finally locked onto not just one but a number of psi-signatures, there was a blue-white flash. That wasn't... "BANK!" he shouted, but it was too late. He wasn't that fast, not with his concentration split the way it was. There was no time to shield, and the energy blast smashed into the Blackbird's left wing.
Kurt was immediately occupied to the exclusion of all else by trying to keep the plane on an even keel. It was not exactly easy, given the damage that had to have been done to the wing.
Nathan tried frantically to locate the energy-projector, to lock onto that particular psi-signature, but it was too much, the plane was lurching in the air and he was having to steady it, too...
The next blast came in too fast, and this time, punched a hole in the hull - right where Logan was sitting.
Logan barely had time to react. Even his phenomenal reflexes failed him. All that he could do was begin to throw himself away from the blast, but his own rigor in making sure that he was thoroughly strapped-in defeated him. The energy washed over him, setting fire to his flesh instantly, but the real damage was done in the cloud of supersonic shrapnel ripped from the Blackbird's fuselage and internal structures. The restraints washed away in fire as he twisted desperately, trying to get out of the path of the beam, to do something. One particularly large chunk ripped up from below, catching Logan just below his floating ribs and ripping across his body as he twisted.
The shrapnel slowed to a comparative crawl in midair as Pietro reacted to the explosion, ripping his belts off and sliding to a crouch on the deck. He saw instantly that there was too much debris in the air to deal with it all--too much, in too little space. Triage, triage . . .
Logan he ignored completely; too much fire reaching that way, and the man would heal anyway. Rogue wouldn't be much more than shaken about. Check her off the list. Terry was closest. Pietro slid around a lick of flame and plucked one, two, three deadly fragments out of the air, the last a wickedly sharp glass wedge that couldn't have been hurled at her center mass more perfectly if it had been aimed. Wagner and Dayspring, up front; he leaped spinning over the main blast, clearing a path with busy hands as he went, and shoved pieces of black hull and twisted wiring safely to one side.
Time, time, there wasn't enough time . . . half a second went by in a hundred anxious heartbeats as he watched the ricochet pattern, watched what his wake did to the shape of the fire, and then he crossed the cabin again, pirouetting dangerously close to the gaping hole, hoping his own momentum would throw some of the blast back out. He snatched one last piece of shrapnel out of Terry's way, then stacked his deadly double handful neatly behind his chair before buckling himself back in to ride out what was almost certainly not going to be a textbook landing. He just hoped he'd done enough.
Marie had thrown off her seatbelt the minute she'd seen the blast hit Logan. Calm, calm. Stay calm Rogue. She kept repeating it to herself even though she was anything but calm as she'd watched shrapnel pierce her friend. Her friend that could heal - if there were enough pieces of him left to do so. No sooner had she started making her way towards him, shrapnel bouncing off her harmlessly, did another blast burst through the hull on the other side of the jet. A stream of air pulled through the two holes, winds rushing past at intense speeds. She didn't have time to say a word before she was sucked out of the plane, too distracted to activate her flight in time, just a dull thought of Not again.
Terry remained in her seat, hands gripping the straps, biting on her lip as the plane bucked and twisted with the attacks. The first blow had knocked the air out of her lungs--good for everyone around her as she gasped uncontrolled. Wind yanked at her hair, filled her lungs again, breath that she held carefully. The second blast threw more shrapnel in the air as Marie was sucked out. A jagged shard of metal cut across Terry's midsection and she cried out involuntarily, tasting blood, the air shivering with power and destruction, not doing the already beaten cabin any favors. She bit her lip again and ducked her head, trying to make herself small.
Kurt, still giving all his focus to keeping the plane in the air, didn't even have time to brace himself when the second blast hit. His left hand slammed into the base of the console as he was thrown forward against his seatbelt, almost simultaneous with his head hitting the instrument panel. Hard.
Nathan sensed Kurt's thoughts wink out, and swore, his teeth clenched and his hands white-knuckled on the controls on his side as he tried to pull the plane out of its sudden spin towards the ground. Two holes in her hull and a damaged wing made that next to impossible, however, even as he poured on the telekinesis.
Too much momentum. The trees were coming at them, and Nathan swore again, desperately – and sheathed the Blackbird in a TK shield, at the last second. #BRACE!#
(OOC: Yes, the log IS in reverse.)
1:38pm
Brimstone. Nathan registered the smell even as he whirled and slammed the flat of his psimitar's blade against the head of the man in front of him. Using his psimitar as a bludgeon. Forge was going to kill him. But he was having a hard enough time staying on his feet, burning through his reserves of energy and concentration at a scary speed. It had taken that much to finally get into the damned house.
They hadn't expected this many. Hadn't been prepared, and while it had been unavoidable, while they'd had to take this chance... we'll be lucky if we all get out of here and can rehash why flying by the seat of your pants is not a good idea.
Kurt was not in good shape, his left hand now all but useless at his side and his face and clothes covered in blood, much of it his. But he was still on his feet and fighting at Nathan's side, kicking with both feet and punching with his good hand. Not to mention occasionally whipping people in the face with his tail.
At this point, Nathan had lost his grip on his teammates' minds entirely. No switchboard, not even the telepathic tags that would at least tell him where they were and their status. He thought he'd sense it if they were in deep trouble, any of them. He hoped. But he couldn't stop to check. Kurt was there, and they were both here, and there was a mind in the room at the end of the hall, one whose acquaintance he was definitely going to make.
Two more Preservers came rushing at him, screaming. One was afire from head to toe; Nathan pivoted, but wasn't fast enough to keep the man from grabbing him. "Race traitor!" the man screamed - or tried to. The telekinetic hammer-blow that slammed into his ribs meant that the epithet was cut off by a choked, bubbling scream. He fell, and Nathan reeled back against the wall, his leathers smoking.
Kurt didn't know as surely as Nathan did about the person at the end of the hall, but these people were trying very hard to keep them away from something. Clearly it was something worth getting to, so he just focused on the door and kept fighting.
They were going to wish they had a medic along as much for their prisoners as for themselves, Nathan thought, even as he broke his other attacker's leg with a telekinetic burst, and slammed the next into the wall head-first. Questions of appropriate force had gone out the window the moment it had become clear how badly they were outnumbered.
Felling those two Preservers created a gap, however, a definite gap, and Nathan flung himself through it and at the door that was just closing. A solid, telekinetically-assisted kick reduced it to splinters.
The backwash sent the man inside flying backwards and to the floor. Only for a moment, though. He was scrambling back to his feet, cursing in a language Nathan didn't know. The face he knew, however. Charles had reinforced the image for him, taken from Jean's mind and Devlin's mind both.
"You," Nathan growled at the Preservers' bombmaker, "are coming with us, you son of a bitch." There was someone rushing at him from behind who wasn't Kurt, and Nathan spun and knocked the man off his feet, then smashed the two who followed to the ground.
*Bamf!* "Right now", Kurt confirmed, pacing forward towards the man with a distinctly demonic grin on his face. The blood almost certainly didn't help. "I hope you enjoy teleporting." With no more warning than that, he reached out to seize the bombmaker's arm, and looked round for Nathan to make contact.
In a flash, they were back in the Blackbird's damaged cabin. Nathan staggered, disoriented, and lost his telekinetic grip on the man. Jinasena, strangely, seemed unaffected by the transition. He kicked out at Kurt's knee savagely, even as he wrenched his arm out of his grasp.
Kurt wasn't at the top of his game, for obvious reasons, and didn't manage to dodge the kick in time. He stumbled and fell, biting back a cry of pain.
Jinasena growled and rushed him, hands outstretched. If the fight had been happening in slow motion, both Nathan and Kurt would have been able to see light sparkling between the ends of his fingers. Ominous light, all things considered. As it was, Nathan sensed the man's thoughts shift purposefully, and conscious thought deserted him, swamped by a tidal wave of pure denial. He intercepted the bombmaker in a move that wouldn't have seemed out of place on a hockey rink. The bodycheck slammed Jinasena to the Blackbird's deck.
Kurt pushed himself painfully to his feet and then, with his good leg, kicked Jinasena in the head, hard and precisely placed to knock him out.
It had precisely the desired effect.
Bracing himself on his psimitar, breathing hard, Nathan forced himself to straighten. He met Kurt's eyes, nodding jerkily, and then lowered his shields and projected on a wide band.
#Check in, everyone. We've got the bombmaker.#
---
1:26pm
Marie’s brown eyes seemed to have grown darker as she rose above the burning pine trees, scanning the horizon. Her eyes narrowed as she finally spotted her quarry and the speed at which she dove out of the sky may have even impressed Pietro. “Are you trying to leave the party without a goodbye kiss?” she called out as she swooped down to grab the shirt of the nearest Preserver, legs lashing out to strike as many of the ones standing near him as she could.
The Preservers didn't seem at all taken aback by the arrival of a clearly angry young woman determined to put 'bowling for terrorists' into practice. They were well-trained and well-disciplined, and although some of them were knocked down, others were already retreating, putting a little distance between themselves and her. Those with long-range powers were turning to strike even as they did, and Marie found herself at the center of an impromptu mass shooting gallery, energy blasts of various sorts coming at her. One man ripped a tree up by the roots and tried to use it as a very large equivalent of a baseball bat.
Marie looked down at the various colors exploding across her body, various chunks of her already torn uniform disintegrating as the blasts were stopped by her impenetrable skin. “That was dumb,” she spat out, grabbing the end of the tree that was swung at her and spinning it around to knock aside some of the Preservers who hadn’t retreated far enough away. The man who’d originally ripped it from the ground dangled from the edge even as she threw it crashing into the woods.
Just when it looked like Marie was going to clear the rest of the impromptu battlefield all by herself, a slender dark-haired woman who'd barely missed being knocked flying by the tree stopped short, turning around to face Marie. A wave of nausea and vertigo swept over the X-Man, all at once. Marie buckled over, cursing loudly as she felt her stomach seize up and the world spun around her. "Coward," she managed to squeeze out.
A couple of the energy projectors seemed to decide in unison to seize upon the opportunity. They hammered her with shot after shot, with the clear intention of knocking her out of the sky.
Marie steeled her mind against the waves racking her body. As the shots hammered against her, she swayed through the sky, seemingly haphazardly until she crashed into the forest.
"She's down!" she heard someone say triumphantly. And then there were several of them rushing her, clearly intending to finish her off.
She waited until they were almost on her before letting a grin spread across her face as her foot lashed, the snap of the dark haired woman's leg ringing through the forest. Her fist smashed into another Preserver's face, blood gushing from his broken nose as he stumbled away from her. "What, now y'all wanna leave?" Marie said with a pout. "Ah was just starting to have fun."
---
1:20pm
Protect the plane, Kurt had ordered her. Nathan had rather unnecessarily reinforced the order, saying something about all of this being for nothing if they didn't have a ride back out of here as he'd flung himself out the hatch. Despite the other X-Men having engaged the Preservers in the trees, the plane was still drawing what seemed like more than its share of attention. A plasma blast washed against the hull, not punching through but leaving a significant scorch mark.
Watch the plane. Terry wasn't sure whether it was a concession to the fact that she was the youngest and least experienced or in spite of that. She screamed shortly at the plasma hurler and smiled in grim satisfaction when the sonic lance knocked him off his feet and into the treeline. Drawing breath hurt, the control required over her stomach muscles hurt even more. But that didn't show.
There was another explosion in the forest. A sizeable portion of it seemed to be burning already - it had gone up a few minutes ago in strange, green-blue flames. None of the X-Men were checking in over the coms, although Rogue was visible in the air, on-and-off. Before Terry could try and raise her teammates, two more Preservers were rushing the plane. One was coming straight at her, while the other came from behind, over the top of the plane in an enormous leap.
Terry held her breath, watching them and biding her time. Sound moved at a steady 761 miles per hour and since neither were a speedster, that meant she had plenty of time to bide. The one running at her didn't move any more quickly or gracefully than normal. He was definitely trying to get close--Terry preferred to not let him. The other landed with a mere bending of the knees, hand just skimming the ground. They were far enough apart that a lance wouldn't have the force to stop them and the sound would be merely painful not ear drum shattering.
So Terry's scream was not simply loud, nor was it designed to destroy--though the turf around her feet took quite the beating. It was hard and dissonant with a vibration that rattled bone and turned the stomach. Drop, you bastards, she thought viciously.
They did. Before she could enjoy her success, there was lightning, or what looked like it, coming at her out of the trees. Crackling bolts of energy slashed at her, one right after the other, and it was only the distance between her and the unseen mutant that saved her in that first moment - the bolts seemed less precise as they traveled over greater distance.
Even so she had to throw her bruised and battered body to the side, away from where the last two terrorists were vomiting from the induced nausea. A short imprecise scream in the direction of the lightning was meant more for distraction than anything--it would be too diffuse to harm him, even though the force behind it was deadly.
The lightning thrower darted forward out of the trees, making a complex gesture with his hands that formed a ball of dancing fire. He flung it outwards - not at Terry, but at the already-damaged wing of the Blackbird.
"Bastard!" the word exploded out of her before she could help it and she whirled, her keen hitting the Blackbird, a broad wave of sound shoving it back, the bottom scraping along the ground. The fireball scorched her skin, so close was it but it missed the 'Bird. She stopped and hissed her displeasure, rising to one knee. Drawing a breath, she focused her voice tightly and the sonic blast was sharp and piercing. It was a sound that could have shattered glass even without the power of her voice behind it. Aimed at a person, it would be devastating.
It certainly dropped the other mutant, shattering his eardrums instantly as he fell. For a moment, everything was still - at least in the immediate vicinity of the Blackbird. It was a short respite however. This time, it was gunfire coming at her from out of the woods. Two different directions.
A tiny weary part of her brain protested the gunfire--they were mutants for the love of God. Terry didn't dwell on it, drawing in a deep breath, staying low to the ground. She had three mutants already piled up around her, this was getting completely out of hand. She felt the scream tear out of her throat without regard for control or restraint. The sound wave rippled over the open field and hit the treeline with an enormous cracking of wood as the trunks splintered. If there was more gunfire, if there were screams, she couldn't hear it--only her voice and the forest.
Terry sent up a prayer that the others weren't having this much trouble.
--
1:12pm
Logan leaned against a nearby pine tree, trying to catch his breath. His right hand was smeared in red and was pressed to his abdomen, trying to hold his intestines in while his healing factor rebuilt his abdominal wall. "Gotta take that house up there." he panted to his companion. If he had to take it using only his eyelids, he would.
"No shit," Nathan said, or started to say. An energy blast sliced out of the forest at them, and although it slammed into his TK shield, it sent him staggering backwards and to his knees in the mud. The shield tried to fray around the edges, to crack. Nathan didn't let it. There was a flare of light in the forest ahead of them, and another hammer-blow of white fire against his shield. Nathan growled under his breath and started to reach out telepathically, seeking the mind of his attacker.
Logan pulled himself away from the tree and, left hand out with claws extended, advanced towards where that blast came from. His stealth left something to be desired as he took a blast full in the chest, throwing him backwards into another tree, which splintered with the impact.
Well, at least he bought me an opening. Nathan snarled and pulled himself back to his feet, lashing out telekinetically at the source of the blast - and feeling bones break at the impact. The Preserver was flung backwards into the dead leaves, and Nathan left the ground in a telekinetically-assisted leap, heading for the treetops. #Wolverine!# he projected - this had all been too fast to set up the switchboard, but he could find the other X-Man's mind easily. #Get up!#
Logan kipped back to his feet, steadfastly ignoring the tearing sensation from inside his gut. Without saying a word, he made an Army hand-motion that translated into "Keep moving!" He advanced, using the trees for cover and once again holding his guts in. His superficial injuries were going unhealed for the time being.
They ought to have left Logan in the 'Bird. Not that he would have stayed. Nathan leapt from treetop to treetop, headed unerringly in the direction of the house, farther up the slope of the mountain - until something, or rather someone blurred through the air at him. Too fast. The impact stunned him, and he and the Preserver came crashing down through the trees for a hard landing. He landed on one shoulder, nearly blacking out from the pain.
Despite his daze, he felt a fist slam into his face - once, twice, and then again. But Logan was on Nate's attacker in a flash, claws flashing out to disable, to injure. Blood splashed crimson in the muted sunlight as the claws bit deep.
The Preserver screamed. Nathan groaned and used the arm that still worked, slamming a telekinetically-enhanced punch into the man's jaw. It knocked him cold, and at least halfway off Nathan, which was helpful. Nathan pushed him the rest of the way off, hauling himself back to his feet. His shoulder was obviously dislocated, and, breathing hard, he paused for a moment, slamming it into a tree to put it back into place.
Logan grinned at Nate's grunt of pain and the sick grinding sound as his shoulder popped back into its socket. Logan paused for a moment to let his healing factor work its magic, put things back together. Standing upright, he took an experimental deep breath. Yep, still hurt like a bitch, but it felt like he was getting some lung capacity back. That was good. He grinned again to Nathan and then loped off through the trees, far more agile and quick this time.
Nathan followed, more slowly. They hadn't gone a hundred meters when seemingly the whole forest caught fire around them.
---
1:03pm
They had to take out those energy-projectors. That much was a given; they were pinned down, and the long-range attacks, especially when they were coming from two directions, were going to finish the job that they started unless they took them out right the hell now.
There was no time to strategize for more than a moment. Nathan had located targets for teammates before, even under strenuous circumstances, and that was what he did now, projecting the locations of the two energy-projectors to Kurt and Pietro. It took only a moment, and that was a good thing, because there was incoming fire again almost instantaneously.
Kurt might be injured, but he was still able to fight. He sent back a quick assent and teleported to the treetop platform Nathan had shown him.
There had been more than one person on that platform, of course; Nathan had shown Kurt as much, but it wasn't as if they had much of a choice. The incoming fire had to stop, one way or the other. The problem was, the energy-projector kept blasting away grimly at his target, and the other two mutants on the platform turned their attention to Kurt.
Both were faster and stronger than the norm; one was nearly as agile as Kurt himself. They both launched themselves at him as soon as he appeared, as if competely unaffected by the surprise of having an opponent suddenly there in close quarters. The other who was a touch slower than the other abruptly demonstrated why, as his skin shimmered and changed color and texture, turning from flesh to something greenish and shiny and far, far harder.
They were fast, but so was he, and neither of them could teleport. Using the advantages he had, Kurt launched into a flurry of kicks at his opponents, bouncing from one side of the platform to the other and counting on his clouds of sulphur to serve as one more point in his favour. If he could just get past them to the energy projector...
A short distance off, Pietro closed in on the other energy projector. A column of fire pouring toward the Blackbird made for an incredibly obvious target, and Pietro allowed himself a tiny smile--only three of them? This would be easy.
Then he crossed into what he'd thought was a field of heat-shimmer, and the world went insane. The ground tilted under his feet, and his stomach twisted with nausea, motion sickness he hadn't felt since he was thirteen. Distance was impossible to judge--one minute the three men looked a mile away, the next close enough to touch. He tripped over his own feet and went down, tucking into a roll, and fetched up bruisingly hard against a tree ten feet to the left of the heading he'd thought he was taking.
A slender, dark-haired man stepped out into view. His eyes were locked on Pietro, a fixed, set look of anger on his face. The sensations of nausea intensified sharply.
Well, that one would have to go first. Pietro gathered his feet under him. All he had to do was launch himself through the air in the right direction--his balance wouldn't make much difference to a ballistic trajectory. The trouble was finding the right trajectory.
The other trouble was that he was outnumbered. Pietro's first leap was driven off-course almost immediately by a hammer-blow from the second guard, a man who looked like nothing so much as a Cain Marko who had shrunken in the wash. Pietro rolled to his feet again, swallowed his gorge, and narrowed his eyes. This had suddenly gotten complicated.
One green-armored arm, just there as Kurt teleported back in - a stroke of bad luck, nothing more - slammed him to the ground. The two were on him again, almost immediately. A booted foot slammed into his ribs, and another came down - on his already injured hand.
A grunt at the kick and then he screamed - biting it back almost immediately - as the boot came down on his hand. He couldn't help it - if the bones hadn't been broken before, and they probably had been, he was almost sure they were now. But maybe the luck hadn't been quite as bad as it seemed... with the two attackers focusing on him, the energy projector was undefended. If he could manage one more jump...
As he appeared, upright, behind the energy projector, the man whirled, getting off a blast that would have taken Kurt directly in the chest if he hadn't knocked his arm away. As it was, it smashed through the platform, destroying the supports and sending what was left falling towards the ground.
Kurt could only brace himself for the first instant, then he lunged forward to grab the energy projector's arm. He doubted he could take more than one passenger, in his current state, so the other two would just have to fend for themselves.
Pietro's target seemed to be able to use both hands to create flame. He sent another fireball at the Blackbird, then a smaller one at Pietro, grinning fiercely, amused contempt in his eyes. In fact, he nearly singed the mutant who'd induced the vertigo, causing the younger man to jump aside with a yelp.
Well-trained, the Preserver recovered almost instantly. His attention was split for only a moment. Of course, to Pietro, "almost instantly" and "only a moment" might as well be a wide-open door with an engraved invitation . . .
He sprang forward, jackhammering one fist into the man's solar plexus and bringing the other down on the back of his neck; the Preserver dropped bonelessly. Rolling to the side, he swept the flamethrower's legs out from under him. Pietro struck the man fifteen times before he hit the ground, then rolled to his feet to give the third man a superior smile.
"If you'd like to surrender now, and save me the trouble of carting you back to the plane later, I'll certainly entertain the offer."
The Cain-esque Preserver just growled and set himself into a defensive position, showing a certain basic level of intelligence by not attempting to rush Pietro. "Don't think you're carting me anywhere," he said in an unmistakable Australian accent.
"Well, when you wake up, remember how much easier it could have been." Pietro lunged forward, a quick exploratory punch to test a theory; the other man's head barely rocked back, and Pietro's knuckles felt like he'd punched a brick. Some measure of invulnerability to go with the strength he'd felt when the man hit him, then. Just as he'd thought.
Pietro's next punch, so quickly after the first that his opponent's contemptuous grin was still forming, sounded like a gunshot. So did the next one. And the kick to the back of the strongman's load-bearing knee. He wasn't more than dazed, though Pietro's knuckles felt raw--the man threw out a hand to catch himself, and would have succeeded if Pietro hadn't simply grabbed him by his belt and collar and picked him up.
Seven gees of acceleration was the generally accepted threshold of consciousness for an unprepared human; Pietro gave his burly opponent fifty, just to be sure, looping a half-mile through the trees in just under two seconds. The Preserver's face was slack and pale as they arrived back at their starting point; he'd be out for a few seconds, plenty of time for Pietro to simply . . . let go. Invulnerable skull met thick oak with a crash that was almost lost in the sonic boom from the run-up; the tree cracked and slowly fell, and the Preserver tumbled limp to the ground. Pietro checked his pulse, smiled briefly, and turned to see how the others were faring.
--
12:58pm
Logan's entire world consisted of pain. The piercing, bubbling sensation in his left lung, the ripped flesh up and down his body, the darkness that he couldn't tell was natural or because the blast had taken his eyes - all of these were bad enough. The worst, however, was the freezing bitter cold that came from just to the right of his navel. He tried to make his hands move, to feel the extent of the damage, but the right one erupted in a blaze of pain and the left one slowly, torturously, meandered its way across his torso to the ragged edge of the wound. He felt something warm and slippery, something barely held in check.
"Wolverine!" Rogue screamed out, diving into the wreckage. Logan could heal, but only if there were enough pieces of him left to do so.
Logan heard Rogue scream from someplace far, far away. He was sinking into a languid warmness, feeling his ravaged body slip away from him inch by inch. Frothy bubbles erupted from his mouth as he tried to say something, tried to tell her that his war was done, that Stryker was right, that it was time to put the animal down. But another side of him raged, screaming obscenities into the warm and comfortable darkness. Something that refused to die without a fight. His left hand slid into the jagged wound, questing around the ropes of intestine and the searing, freezing pain to find ... yes. A jagged shard of metal through his kidney. He had to pull it out, had to get rid of it. Somehow.
The flash of movement was enough to catch Rogue's eyes, though if not for the sun glinting on the piece of metal spearing Logan's kidney she might have missed it through the smokey haze. Whizzing through the air, she landed beside him, gloved hands reaching out to gather him in her arms. He looked worse than she'd ever seen and she found her face growing wet as she stared at the broken body she saw in front of her. "Come on Logan...you gotta be ok. Ah need you to be ok."
Logan thought someone might have been talking to him. Someone important. He was moved, and each movement brought a fresh wave of agony to rip and tear at his mind, as his bloody determination. "no" he said, feather-soft, more blood-bubbles bursting into the open air. His fingers, coated in blood, couldn't seem to get any purchase on the metal in his kidney. They scrabbled over the jagged metal, cutting themselves open time and time again, trying to gain some purchase.
Her eyes followed the movement of his hands and her hands quickly followed, grabbing the edge of the metal and pulling. She winced at the squishing wetness of the sound that accompanied it's removal - but she knew that it was the only way he could heal.
Each centimeter that the shard moved brought new, fresh agonies. But once the blade was gone, only the freezing cold remained. His body shiverred, spraying bright red blood-drops hither and yon. From inside the wound, fresh connective tissue sprouted, muscles began to slowly re-knit themselves together, perforations sewed themselves together at a vastly accelerated rate. But for each severed blood vessel that was repaired and restored to function, another one uselessly allowed its precious contents to spill out onto the ground.
Marie gathered him into her arms, rocking back and forth slightly. Everything she knew about first aid didn't apply here so she didn't worry about keeping him stable. Instead, she ran her hands over him looking for more shards where they shouldn't be, removing them to allow the healing process to begin.
There were a distressing number of the Blackbird's hull fragments embedded in Logan's body. The healing process was working, but it was terribly slow. It was basically a race between his ability to heal and Death herself. His uniform was in ribbons, slashed through and through by the cloud of shrapnel. His one eye was ruined, and his other was rolled back as far as it could go into its socket.
"Wake up damn you," Marie muttered, holding him in much the same way he'd held her those years ago. She was careful to avoid his skin against hers, the knowledge that a single touch could aid Death in her ploy for Logan's life. "Come on."
The wound in his abdomen finally started to knit itself closed, the flesh slowly writhing under its own power, blindly seeking to bridge the gap and make him once again whole. His one good eye - the other was still ruined - uncrossed and he blinked some of the sweat and blood out of his eye. "Hey, kid." he rasped in a whisper.
"Hey," she said, tears still streaming from her face. "Don't scare me like that again, 'kay?"
Logan tried for a reassuring smile but wound up with a bloody grimace. "What's going on?" he asked, trying to relax and accept the pain currently flooding his synpases rather than to fight it and thus make things worse.
"Ah…Ah dunno, " Marie said, rubbing her face with a gloved hand and looking up to glance blearily around. Smoke made visibility almost nonexistant and Marie realized how lucky she was to have found Logan so quickly.
A large shape moved towards them, out of the smoke. It was Nathan. "Pull yourselves together if you can," he said roughly. "We're about to have company."
--
12:54pm
"Kurt..." There was nothing like trying to break the instrument panel with one's head. Nathan eased his friend back into the chair, coughing on the smoke that seemed to fill the cabin. "Kurt, come on, wake up-" He could sense Terry and Pietro, and Logan - not in good shape, but there - and Marie, farther off.... and far too many other psi-signatures approaching.
There was blood on Kurt's face when his head flopped back enough to let Nathan see it, from a dozen cuts where the glass had smashed under him, but there didn't appear to be any damage to his eyes, for a blessing. He groaned quietly, stirring on the way to waking up.
"Kurt!" You did not smack the man with a possible head injury. You just didn't. Smacking the concussed was bad. Nathan reached into his mind instead, dragging him back to something approaching full consciousness. "Nightcrawler! We've got incoming, look lively!"
That got through to him as most other things couldn't have, and he sat up and looked around, still groggy but as alert as he was likely to get for the next few minutes at least.
Nathan held onto his shoulder. "Pietro! Terry?" He pieced together the shield around the Blackbird - he'd lost it as the plane had come to a stop, finally - and did it just in time. The damaged plane still shook as multiple energy blasts impacted the shield. "Shit!"
"I'm going to assume that wasn't a direct order," Pietro called back wryly. "I'm fine. I think Siryn got grazed by something, though." Footing had been too unsteady during the actual crash for him to take up another shrapnel collection; still, it niggled at his pride.
"I'm fine," Terry gritted out. "It's nothing serious." She straightened, or tried to, and stopped with a hiss. "Do we have any numbing cream?" Moving, right now, would not be fun. She'd need a bandage too.
Pietro unclipped one of the first aid kits and brought it over. "Can you manage it yourself, and will you be able to fight after? It appears we're about to be entertaining guests."
"Aye, I'll be fine." Terry nodded and unlatched her restraints, shrugging them off her shoulders and managing to sit up straight this time. The leather on her stomach had been cut clean through and a jagged strip of metal was still embedded in her skin. She stared for a second, wondering if she was in shock. Her head felt remarkably clear and a thousand miles distant, "Can you help me with this first? I can wrap it after."
--
12:41pm
"I wonder how things are going in New York," Nathan said quietly. He was sitting in the co-pilot's seat, Kurt beside him actually flying the Blackbird. The other members of the team were behind in the cabin, keyed up in various ways. Having to take off on the fly like this, hoping that this bastard in New York hadn't had the chance to warn anyone at their target that he'd been arrested...
Kurt was focusing on his task, but not so much he couldn't talk to his friend. "We will find out soon enough, I suspect", he said with a faint tense smile. "In any event, at least we know one of their leaders is in custody."
"That's not all that much of a consolation. We need the right one." And he was anxious about Angelo, too, knowing he was caught up in whatever was happening in New York. Part of him wanted to be there. Part of him knew he was more useful here. If they found this bombmaker, they needed to make sure he couldn't do to anyone else what had been done to Scott, and the easiest way to accomplish that was a TK bubble.
And Jean was in Florida, with her husband.
"And we will get him", Kurt offered, trying for absolute confidence. "Today."
Nathan raised an eyebrow at him, cracking an unwilling smile. "The pep talks don't come easily to you, do they?"
"Talking does not always come easily to me", Kurt countered wryly. "Especially in a situation like this."
"You know," Nathan said wryly, his eyes shifting back to the terrain rushing past beneath them, the forested mountains of the Sierra Madre surprisingly misty, for midday, "I can't really say that's a bad thing. Talking is very rarely a good thing, in our job..." He glanced at the console. "Coming up on the coordinates," he said, more business-like. "I'm not so sure where we're going to land..."
"I suppose we will see when we get closer. Hopefully there will be a clear space not too far away but if not... you have me." He thought he could get a good enough look at the place while they flew over.
"All we need is a clearing big enough-" Nathan's voice was a little distant; he was scanning ahead, trying to locate the minds at their target. He didn't see the house he'd seen in Devlin's mind yet. "Get yourselves ready to deploy, folks," he called back over his shoulder. "Coming up on the target."
Terry ceased her pacing and glanced up front, still a little miffed that she wasn't getting to at least co pilot this time. "He couldn't just say 'we're almost here, buckle up'?" she muttered as she took her seat, speaking too softly for anyone but Logan to have caught it. "He makes it sound like we're jumping out of here."
"Shut it, kid." he said, softly enough so that it should only have reached Terry's ears. He then double checked all of his connections. He had the wing-side seat today and the sky was a nice cerulean shade of blue. "Go in ten?" he said up towards the cockpit so that Kurt and Nate could hear him.
"Keep your pants on," was Nathan's irritable response. "We're still looking for an LZ." He was scanning, still. They were out there somewhere, had to be... "They were here when Charles scanned with Cerebro," he muttered. "Surely they can't have cleared out this fast." Scanning from a fast moving plane was screwing with his focus, though.
"Maybe they've got shields," Marie said, breaking the silence she'd held since soon after they'd taken off. "Something they put up after the professor found them?" She refused to accept the idea that they'd moved that quickly. They were catching the bastards today.
"I hope not," Pietro said from where he lounged toward the back of the plane, feet up on one of the empty seats. "If they've cleared out or put shields up, then it's possible they know we're coming, so the mission profile skews a lot more complicated. We can still hope they're only looking for us on radar, I suppose, but if they're able to pick up on Xavier . . ." He shrugged expressively.
"Bad thought," Nathan muttered, but tuned out the others, at that point. If they weren't here, if they'd lost their chance... Out of the corner of his eye, in the same instant that he finally locked onto not just one but a number of psi-signatures, there was a blue-white flash. That wasn't... "BANK!" he shouted, but it was too late. He wasn't that fast, not with his concentration split the way it was. There was no time to shield, and the energy blast smashed into the Blackbird's left wing.
Kurt was immediately occupied to the exclusion of all else by trying to keep the plane on an even keel. It was not exactly easy, given the damage that had to have been done to the wing.
Nathan tried frantically to locate the energy-projector, to lock onto that particular psi-signature, but it was too much, the plane was lurching in the air and he was having to steady it, too...
The next blast came in too fast, and this time, punched a hole in the hull - right where Logan was sitting.
Logan barely had time to react. Even his phenomenal reflexes failed him. All that he could do was begin to throw himself away from the blast, but his own rigor in making sure that he was thoroughly strapped-in defeated him. The energy washed over him, setting fire to his flesh instantly, but the real damage was done in the cloud of supersonic shrapnel ripped from the Blackbird's fuselage and internal structures. The restraints washed away in fire as he twisted desperately, trying to get out of the path of the beam, to do something. One particularly large chunk ripped up from below, catching Logan just below his floating ribs and ripping across his body as he twisted.
The shrapnel slowed to a comparative crawl in midair as Pietro reacted to the explosion, ripping his belts off and sliding to a crouch on the deck. He saw instantly that there was too much debris in the air to deal with it all--too much, in too little space. Triage, triage . . .
Logan he ignored completely; too much fire reaching that way, and the man would heal anyway. Rogue wouldn't be much more than shaken about. Check her off the list. Terry was closest. Pietro slid around a lick of flame and plucked one, two, three deadly fragments out of the air, the last a wickedly sharp glass wedge that couldn't have been hurled at her center mass more perfectly if it had been aimed. Wagner and Dayspring, up front; he leaped spinning over the main blast, clearing a path with busy hands as he went, and shoved pieces of black hull and twisted wiring safely to one side.
Time, time, there wasn't enough time . . . half a second went by in a hundred anxious heartbeats as he watched the ricochet pattern, watched what his wake did to the shape of the fire, and then he crossed the cabin again, pirouetting dangerously close to the gaping hole, hoping his own momentum would throw some of the blast back out. He snatched one last piece of shrapnel out of Terry's way, then stacked his deadly double handful neatly behind his chair before buckling himself back in to ride out what was almost certainly not going to be a textbook landing. He just hoped he'd done enough.
Marie had thrown off her seatbelt the minute she'd seen the blast hit Logan. Calm, calm. Stay calm Rogue. She kept repeating it to herself even though she was anything but calm as she'd watched shrapnel pierce her friend. Her friend that could heal - if there were enough pieces of him left to do so. No sooner had she started making her way towards him, shrapnel bouncing off her harmlessly, did another blast burst through the hull on the other side of the jet. A stream of air pulled through the two holes, winds rushing past at intense speeds. She didn't have time to say a word before she was sucked out of the plane, too distracted to activate her flight in time, just a dull thought of Not again.
Terry remained in her seat, hands gripping the straps, biting on her lip as the plane bucked and twisted with the attacks. The first blow had knocked the air out of her lungs--good for everyone around her as she gasped uncontrolled. Wind yanked at her hair, filled her lungs again, breath that she held carefully. The second blast threw more shrapnel in the air as Marie was sucked out. A jagged shard of metal cut across Terry's midsection and she cried out involuntarily, tasting blood, the air shivering with power and destruction, not doing the already beaten cabin any favors. She bit her lip again and ducked her head, trying to make herself small.
Kurt, still giving all his focus to keeping the plane in the air, didn't even have time to brace himself when the second blast hit. His left hand slammed into the base of the console as he was thrown forward against his seatbelt, almost simultaneous with his head hitting the instrument panel. Hard.
Nathan sensed Kurt's thoughts wink out, and swore, his teeth clenched and his hands white-knuckled on the controls on his side as he tried to pull the plane out of its sudden spin towards the ground. Two holes in her hull and a damaged wing made that next to impossible, however, even as he poured on the telekinesis.
Too much momentum. The trees were coming at them, and Nathan swore again, desperately – and sheathed the Blackbird in a TK shield, at the last second. #BRACE!#
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}