xp_logs | Genosha: Onwards To Victory: The X-Tinction Agenda Failsafe

Inside the prison, the escape face a rude shcok as Thomas Moreau confronts them. He's not entirely as he was last time they faced him.

“Sir, we have to fall back!” Corporal Brin shouted. The Magistrates were desperately returning fire, but it was clear that with their powers restored, they were no match for the mutant prisoners. A dozen lay dead or injured, and dispatch had answered their frantic calls for help with the equally frantic responses that they had no one left to send, as their security forces had been deployed all over the Citadel to try and face the threats coming from all sides.

“No! We were told to hold them here at all costs. And that’s what we’re-“ Captain Li’s orders were cut off as an energized piece of chain punched through his head like a bullet, and his lifeless body collapsed to the floor.

“Fuck this. Bravo company! Fall back! I repeat, fall back and regroup by the armory!” They started to lay down suppressing fire, as the young Corporal found himself in charge of his unit and completely at a loss for what to do. He ducked around the block corner, just avoiding a blast of scarlet that nearly took off his head. The far massive loading bay door was at the far end, and his unit could safely retreat through there. He hit the power button, watching the door start to rise with agonizing slowness to him.

“I’m going to set up a defensive line at the armory. We can fall back and coordinate units to-“ As the door opened, Brin’s orders trailed off, staring in shock at the figure behind the door.

“Fall back? Those weren’t my orders.” Thomas Moreau’s voice sounded odd. “I don’t like it when my orders aren’t obeyed. Makes you sound like a traitor. And there’s one solution for traitors.” Brin screamed as a long spike plunged through his stomach, impaling him and pulling him up into the air. “No retreat. No running before these scum.” A metal hand clasped Brin’s shoulder, and the young Magistrate was ripped in two.

“Mutants!” Moreau stepped around the corner. He was barely recognizable as a man. His body was huge, a twenty foot trunk ended with a massive metal barbed tail. His torso led up, covered in overlapping armor plates and bristling with spikes and weapons which bobbed and tracked the figures in the room. His head also bobbed at the end of a long neck, like a snake’s, and his eyes glowed a bright blue.

“What the fuck…” Remy exhaled softly, stunned like the rest of them as Moreau stepped in closer.

“None of you are going anywhere. Surrender, and there’s a nice life as a mutate waiting. Fight, and I will rip your spines out and spikefuck your eye sockets. Last chance, filth.”

"My God," Scott muttered as he shook of the shock that had overcome him, "What has he done?" His eyes quickly flashed over Moreau's body trying to identify all the weapons on him. "Pull back! Defensive positions everyone." he called to the escaped prisoners. "We don't surrender," he called over to Moreau trying to enrage him, "especially not to monsters like you."

Marie-Ange stumbled back, shaking her head as if to clear it. "C'est quoi ce bordel?" A wall of discs started growing up around her feet and she squinted at them, and then they retreated. "What the fuck is right." How did you even fight a thing like that?

"Bloody hellfire." Amanda breathed out the curse, instinctively taking a step back. "What did he do to himself?"

Meat dripped off over metal, like a horrible web of tendons on a steel skeleton. The figure continued to rise, until it finally stood, a full twenty feet of flesh wrapped steel. The head swiveled towards the mutants, red eyes glowing in the hybrid face.

What Thomas Moreau had done to himself was to give himself a form that could have been drawn from Doug Ramsey's primal fears, a hideous amalgamation of the technological and organic combining to make a monstrosity the size of a small house.

Drowning, hands thumping feebly... If a telepath (so in this case Haller, as the only one close enough) had been paying close enough attention to Doug's mental landscape, they might have heard the 'sound' of a door slamming shut, and the clicks of locks being thrown, one after another. And in the 'picture' of his mind, there would have been nothing but a bare hallway, all of the doors along its length shut tight.

Instinctively, Doug had stepped forward, so that if the...thing were to attack, to get to either Marie-Ange, or Terry, or Amanda, it would have to go through him. If he craned his neck, he could see the faded yellow of the bruise where he'd headbutted the bigoted minister during intake. His fists curled even tighter and his eyes hardened. Moreau had turned himself into a monster, let his outside match the ugliness inside. And there was only one thing to do with monsters.

Put them down.

"Hello, Godzilla," Terry said as she reached for Doug's arm. She had a pretty good idea

of what his intentions were, but Scott had ordered a fall back, and it sounded like a pretty good idea in the face of that... Thing. She looked around to establish other's positions.

Falling back as ordered, Clarice stared up at Moreau. "You're wrong."

He looks like the snake dudes from Ninjago," it was a kids cartoon about lego ninjas. She swallowed, "No surrender sounds good though. Death before that thing. But I might sing the Barney song," it seemed oddly appropriate, if absolutely wrong.

Lex paused for less than a moment and pulled into line with the rest of his team, "A round says that he got the inspiration from Robocop 2. Now, let's keep it together and do what Cyclops says: defensive positions!" He took up a stance that would allow him to channel a lot of energy quickly, and started to draw it in. That things gotta be powered by something, and if I can drain it then he'll be easy to take out.

Tabitha flung bomb after bomb at him, annoying ones that were loud and bright. A really big one wouldn't be the best with all her teammates around. She caught his attention, though. A massive limb flew through the air at a startling speed and Tabitha was swatted aside like a fly.

While still injured, Korvus was still exceptionally nimble and strong with the return of his powers. It appeared to be little effort for him to intersect Tabitha's trajectory to catch her. He set her down gently, in contrast to his mutation. "Farther back may be necessary."

Scott nodded as he unleashed an optical blast directly at Moreau striking him directly on his chest, the X-man grimaced in annoyance as he failed to even disrupt the behemoth's forward motion. "You heard the man," he called to his colleagues. "Keep it calm, keep it steady and keep falling moving back." Their powers didn't seem to be having much of an effect on the advancing Moreau, but the longer they could hold him the more chance of reinforcements arriving to bolster their number. "Legion," he called catching sight of Haller, "do you think you can slow him down a little?"

Jim had been watching the fight with an odd kind of detachment. He'd thought the sight of Moreau would enrage him. Now, with the thing that had been Moreau standing in front of them with the blood of one of his own men still glistening on one spiked appendage and no humanity left in his eyes, all the anger and pain fell to the wayside. This was no longer about the Institute and its allies. As he watched Moreau shrug off Scott's blast after tossing Tabitha aside like a doll, every corner of his fractured psyche whispered that for the Genoshan Minister it had gone far, far beyond that.

We're agreed, thought Jim as he raised a hand almost before Scott had even finished giving the order, You need to go.

And with absolute calm, David Haller unleashed everything he had.

Power poured from him, more power than he'd used since confronting that tsunami in California years ago, a silent wave of ghostly white light swirling and twisting like the currents of a swollen river that rushed forward to engulf the monstrous bulk of Moreau. It splashed against the walls and now there was sound, the sound of a hammer of God striking the side of a mountain that transformed into a shrieking crack as the mass of concrete and steel was pulverized only to instantly re-fuse under the frisson of wild telekinesis.

In less time than it would have taken to drawn and release a breath, what had been the spidery, nightmarish shape of Moreau was nothing but a settling heap of metal and stone.

Jim lowered his hand as the last ripple of power faded, faintly stunned as he watched a few pieces of slagged concrete and twisted metal drip from what had previously been a substantial chunk of the Citadel's interior structure. Yet, almost in afterthought, the part of him that would never forget what it was like to kill with his powers working in tandem wondered: Why didn't I feel his mind?

Scott gingerly removed his hands from his ears, he had seen Haller unleash everything he had once but never from this close. "Ok, that was impressive," he began before he caught sight of some movement inside the dust cloud and his next words died on his lips.

Moreau's grinning visage emerged from the shattered concrete, and the massive blocks shifted as his body pulled itself from under the rubble. He seemed to unfold, like a giant mechanical spider, and towered over them as he crept forward.

"Was that your best shot? If so, I'd really suggest surrendering. Because in less than a minute, I'll be one hundred percent again. Can you say the same when I ram a spike through your fucking heads?" Spittle and hydralic fluid dripped from his mouth as he spoke, an insane bent to his speech. "Ten of you; a hundred; a thousand. It doesn't matter. Once I'm done here, I'm going to your mansion to cut Xavier's head open, wire that big brain of his into his Cerebro, and as a mutate, he'll find us every mutant on this planet. Your race belongs to us now. Or I'm going to kill you slowly and painfully here in the dirt and the grime. Your choice, filth."

Of all of those present, only Jim truly appreciated the implications of what had just occurred. What he'd unleashed against Moreau wasn't simply telekineses, but a multi-leveled psychokinetic assault that should have physically and psychically annihilated everything in its path. It had been his best shot.

Moreau had taken it point-blank, and the only thing slowing the Minister was the debris.

White-faced, the telepath dragged his eyes from the nightmare of metal and flesh and turned to Scott.

"We need to run."